The Baby in the Icebox and Other Short Fiction

Cain’s first published short story — “Pastorale” — was written for H. L. Mencken while Cain was still working on the New York World, and it grew out of a profile of William Gilbert Patten that Cain did for the Saturday Evening Post. Patten, who wrote under the pseudonym Burt L. Standish, created the fictional hero Frank Merriwell, and Cain was probably drawn to him because they both started their careers in the same manner — trying to sell short stories to magazines. During their interview, Patten told Cain a story about a couple of western roughnecks who committed a gruesome crime. Patten’s point in telling the story was to illustrate a friend’s fiendish sense of humor, but to Patten’s horror Cain took the anecdote as truly hilarious and, furthermore, asked Patten if he could use it someday in a piece of fiction. Patten said he did not mind, and Cain thought about it for several months before shifting the story to his favorite locale and telling it in the first person, through the eyes of an Eastern Shore roughneck. He called it “Pastorale,” a deceptively benign title for its grisly doings, and submitted it to Mencken, who published it in the March 1928 Mercury. It is a very funny tale, told in the Ring Lardner manner, and David Madden, author of the only full-length literary study of Cain, considers it Cain’s best short story. It was also an extremely important event in Cain’s evolution as a writer of fiction. In the first place, he now found that he could tell a story in some manner other than dialogue or one-act plays by writing in the first person, preferably the voice of some “low-life character,” as his mother called the type. “The only way I can keep on the track at all,” he said, trying to explain this idiosyncrasy, “is to pretend to be somebody else — to put it in dialect and thus get it told. If I try to do it in my own language I find that I have none. A style that seems to be personal enough for ordinary gassing refuses to get going for an imaginary narrative. So long as I merely report what people might have said under certain circumstances, I am all right; but the moment I have to step in myself, and try to create the impression that what happened to those people really matters, then I am sunk. I flounder about, not knowing whether I should skip to the scene at the church or pile in a little more of the talk at the post office. The reason is... I don’t care what happened. It doesn’t matter to me. Narratively, I do not exist, I have no impulse to hold an audience.”

In “Pastorale,” Cain not only managed to make his narrator care what happened, enabling the story to move, he also found his favorite theme: Although two people may get away with committing a crime, they cannot live with it.

“Pastorale” was also important to Cain as a demonstration that his style was in no way influenced by or copied from Ernest Hemingway, as some critics charged. “Pastorale” was written in late 1927, and by then Cain’s narrative technique and ear for dialogue — which in a few years would constitute one of the most widely discussed and imitated literary styles in the country — were clearly established. His realistic, colloquial dialogue had gradually emerged from the pieces he had been writing for Mencken since 1924; and the technique he used in most of his novels, themselves written in the first person, originated more or less with “Pastorale.” He says — and there is no reason not to believe him — that he did not read Hemingway until Men Without Women appeared in 1928, and he was tremendously impressed. But what surprised him was “an echo I found in it, of something I couldn’t place.” Then he remembered the voice: It was Roxy Stimson, the divorced wife of Jess Smith, a lackey of Attorney General Harry Daugherty, one of the key figures in the Teapot Dome scandal. In 1924 Roxy testified at the Senate Hearings on Teapot Dome and her manner of speech, as Cain recalled, “burst on the country like a July Fourth rocket.” Her tale, describing Smith’s slow deterioration as he was caught up in the scandal and his own foolish speculations in the stock market, electrified the country, especially the literary world, for which Roxy briefly became the object of a cult. “She could come popping out with some bromide,” Cain said, “a cornball expression that should have been pure hush puppy, and somehow transform it, the way Dvořak transformed folk music, so it stayed in your ear as a classic.”

Roxy’s testimony was carried in full in the New York Times, and Cain assumed it reached Paris, where he was certain Hemingway had absorbed it. He became convinced that his theory was correct when he finally read “Fifty Grand” and noted the similarity in its plot, especially in an incident described by Roxy Stimson, prior to Jess Smith’s suicide. As for Roxy’s influence on Cain’s style: “She taught me respect for the cliche. I’d say she influenced me plenty,” he said.

The good response to “Pastorale” encouraged Cain to write another short story, this one based on an experience in France on the night of September 26, 1918, during the opening of the Meuse-Argonne offensive. Again, Cain elected to tell the story in the first-person narration of an Eastern Shore rube, although the incident actually happened to him and he could just as easily have told it in his own near-perfect diction. “The Taking of Montfaucon” also appeared in the Mercury and was reprinted in 1929 and 1942 in the Infantry Journal, which said, “[It] has never been excelled as an accurate description of conditions in the war and few stories of any aspect of the war will stand beside it.”

After “Montfaucon,” Cain worked exclusively on dialogues to round out his book Our Government, then moved to California, where, for the first year or so, he tried to establish himself as a screenwriter. When Paramount let him go — after six months of unsuccessful scriptwriting efforts — he decided to resume his fiction. His first story ideas grew out of the automobile trips around Southern California he and his wife, Elina, used to take, sometimes with the two kids. One place they liked to stop was the Goebels Lion Farm on the road to Ventura. Cain had a lifelong fascination with cats — especially big ones. His feelings for them bordered on fanaticism: “I find it impossible,” he said, “to believe in a life after death, and if you don’t accept that, the Christian theology goes up in smoke... To me, God is life, and if no immortal soul figures in, then all must be included in the concept. So animals to me take on a mystic meaning, more perhaps than they do to most people.” Cain wrote editorials and several short stories about tigers; he wrote Hearst columns about panthers; and late in life he wrote an unpublished novel about a little girl who is given a tiger cub, which she raises as a pet.

Out at Goebels, Cain conceived an idea for a story about a couple who run a gas station and lunchroom on the road to Ventura. Their trouble starts when the husband, Duke, decides to add some big cats to interest the children and draw more customers. Cain called his story “The Baby in the Icebox,” and although he also wrote it in his first-person, Ring Lardner style, he found that when he moved from the Eastern Shore and put his story in the mouth of a western roughneck, a type he was beginning to observe in California, he was writing in a comfortable, natural style that had distinctive flavor and pace. The famous James M. Cain momentum began to emerge.

“The Baby in the Icebox” is a tribute to Cain’s ability to tell an improbable tale believably — and to make it eminently readable. It was also an important link in the chain that eventually led to Cain’s phenomenal career as a novelist. When Mencken showed Knopf the galleys of “The Baby in the Icebox,” the publisher wrote Cain that the story “is a whopper — one of the best I have read, and it encourages me to believe that one of these days you may try your hand at a novel.”

Cain replied that he still did not think he could write long fiction, but added that Knopf’s note might be just the encouragement he needed. Then he outlined an idea for a story which would soon become The Postman Always Rings Twice.

“The Baby in the Icebox” sold immediately to Paramount, but when the movie — She Made Her Bed — based on the story was released in the spring of 1934, it was panned by the critics. This did not affect Cain, who by that time was riding the crest of the wave created by the publication of Postman. Usually, the leads to the movie reviews referred to Cain or “the most famous story by James M. Cain” rather than to the movie itself, and most reviewers relieved Cain of all responsibility for the film’s failure. Said Bosley Crowther in the New York Times: “Though it is fastened upon a story by James M. Cain, the blame for this picture is too large, too richly complicated to be attached to one person.”

With the publication of Postman, James M. Cain was suddenly famous and in demand. His agent, James Geller, quickly sold two of his stories, written at about the time he wrote “The Baby in the Icebox” but rejected by several editors (“Come Back,” about a bit player trying to make a comeback in Hollywood riding a famous horse; and “The Whale, the Cluck and the Diving Venus,” about an Eastern Shore hustler who tries to promote a tourist attraction by putting a whale in a swimming pool). Cain was working at a furious pace — “the fastest two-finger typist I ever saw,” says his stepson, Leo Tyszecki. He started a series of food articles, which drove Edith Haggard, his new agent, nearly frantic. “You have made me an old woman, lad. With the magazine world at your feet, with their hands raised high over their heads pleading for short stories, you want to write food articles.”

He was also writing a three-times-a-week syndicated column for the Hearst papers, working on a play to be based on Postman, beginning a magazine serial to be called Double Indemnity, and taking studio assignments, during one of which he dictated a short story, “Hip, Hip, Hippo,” about a Hollywood bit player who tried to make a comeback riding a hippopotamus in a big movie, not one of Cain’s better efforts.

By this time, Cain had also outlined a novel, eventually to be called Serenade, for Knopf, and the publisher was urging him to finish it and take advantage of all the publicity surrounding the publication of Postman. But Cain was still not satisfied that the basic idea for Serenade was sound, and he settled down to respond to his New York agent’s plea that he write more short stories. But once again, as with his food articles, he flabbergasted Ms. Haggard, this time by writing a third-person story about a girl and a boy and the boy’s fear of diving off high places. He called it “The Birthday Party” and sent it off to New York. An amazed Edith Haggard replied, “It’s a new writer who signs himself James M. Cain!” She had been pleading for more stories — but a children’s birthday party? Most of New York’s magazine editors agreed. “It would be hard to imagine anything more different from The Postman Always Rings Twice,” wrote the assistant editor of This Week in rejecting the story. “Although we are by no means demanding that he spend the rest of his life rewriting Postman, we had hoped for something as swift-moving and full of action.” Ms. Haggard finally sold “The Birthday Party” to the Ladies’ Home Journal for $750.

After that, with Ms. Haggard still pleading for a murder story, he finished Double Indemnity, then started to work on another short story that he expected would be more to the agent’s liking. He recalled how, when he was living in Burbank, he would drive home from one of the studios and be detained night after night by the freight trains at the crossings. As he sat there watching the boxcars go by, he was appalled by the hoboes — “the hundreds of human derelicts silhouetted against the Verdugo Hills, perched like crows on top of the cars, going nowhere and knowing they were going nowhere.” As he thought about these men, his mind — with the usual Cain twist — began to play on an idea: What would happen if one of these hoboes, perhaps unwittingly, became involved in some scrape, such as a murder? Characteristically, Cain was more interested in the hobo’s subjective reaction than in his battle with the law. “When a murderer comes to grips with the law,” Cain thought, “he has a better than even chance to win. But, because of forces inside of him, his crime eventually catches up with him” — again, Cain’s favorite theme.

By now Cain had firmly established his style and milieu. After “The Birthday Party” had satisfied him that he could write salable stories in the third person, he decided to try his hobo tale, which he called “Dead Man,” in the third person. Ms. Haggard wrote back one of what Cain called “those Mama-knows-best letters,” suggesting the story would have a much better chance of selling if he made the ending more pleasant. Cain must have wanted the money badly because in uncharacteristic fashion he changed the ending to make it commercial. But still it did not sell. Then one day, when he was in New York working on his play based on Postman, he received a call from Paul Palmer, the new editor of the Mercury. Palmer was calling about “Dead Man,” which Edith Haggard had finally submitted to him. “Jim, I like it fine,” Palmer said, “and want to run it in the next issue, except that this damned Pollyanna ending doesn’t sound like you... Could you fix me up another?” Cain restored the original ending, and the story appeared in the March 1936 Mercury. It is perhaps his best third-person story and has been reprinted at least half a dozen times, including an appearance in the O. Henry collection.

By the mid-1930s, after the publication of Serenade, Cain was giving most of his writing energy to novels and to trying to make it as a screenwriter, which he never did. But responding to Edith Haggard’s pleadings, he wrote a few more short stories — all in the third person — which she sold to Liberty: “Brush Fire,” “Coal Black,” “Everything but the Truth,” and “The Girl in the Storm.”

The last short story in this section (“Joy Ride to Glory”) was probably written sometime in the late 1930s. It was never published but turned up in a collection of Cain manuscripts purchased in Los Angeles by Stuart and Roger Birnbaum. In that the Birnbaums have, to the best of my knowledge, the only copy of the story in existence, their cooperation was necessary, and I wish to thank them for giving me permission to include it in this collection. The story is written in the first person and concerns a young man who, in escaping from prison, takes a perilous underground journey through a storm sewer. The idea for this story must have grown out of an experience Cain had when he lived on Belden Drive in Hollywood Hills. One day after a storm, he was appalled to look out of his window and see a little girl being swept by the swollen waters in a gutter toward a large open drain that would have carried her underground. Suddenly, one of his neighbors, the composer George Antheil, came rushing from his house in his underwear and scooped the little girl up in his arms just before she would have disappeared into the sewer. Earlier, when Cain was an editorial writer for the New York World, he had met Antheil after he had written a critical editorial about Antheil’s composition Ballet Mechanique. Cain did not like the composer or his music, but after the incident at the storm sewer, he said he felt kindly disposed toward him the rest of his life.

After returning to the East in 1948 and becoming mired in a Civil War novel, Cain returned to short-story writing, hoping to make some quick money. He wrote several stories, some of which were sold to Esquire and adventure magazines such as Manhunt. They were consciously commercial stories, not up to his earlier work. But this did not bother Cain; he always felt that stories written primarily for magazines did not count.

R.H.

Pastorale

The Taking of Montfaucon

The Baby in the Icebox

Of course there was plenty pieces in the paper about what happened out at the place last summer, but they got it all mixed up, so I will now put down how it really was, and ’specially the beginning of it, so you will see it is not no lies in it.

Because when a guy and his wife begin to play leapfrog with a tiger, like you might say, and the papers put in about that part and not none of the stuff that started it off, and then one day say X marks the spot and next day say it wasn’t really no murder but don’t tell you what it was, why, I don’t blame people if they figure there was something funny about it or maybe that somebody ought to be locked up in the booby hatch. But there wasn’t no booby hatch to this, nothing but plain onriness and a dirty rat getting it in the neck where he had it coming to him, as you will see when I get the first part explained right.

Things first begun to go sour between Duke and Lura when they put the cats in. They didn’t need no cats. They had a combination auto camp, filling station, and lunchroom out in the country a ways, and they got along all right. Duke run the filling station, and got me in to help him, and Lura took care of the lunchroom and shacks. But Duke wasn’t satisfied. Before he got this place he had raised rabbits, and one time he had bees, and another time canary birds, and nothing would suit him now but to put in some cats to draw trade. Maybe you think that’s funny, but out here in California they got every kind of a farm there is, from kangaroos to alligators, and it was just about the idea that a guy like Duke would think up. So he begun building a cage, and one day he showed up with a truckload of wildcats.

I wasn’t there when they unloaded them. It was two or three cars waiting and I had to gas them up. But soon as I got a chance I went back there to look things over. And believe me, they wasn’t pretty. The guy that sold Duke the cats had went away about five minutes before, and Duke was standing outside the cage and he had a stick of wood in his hand with blood on it. Inside was a dead cat. The rest of them was on a shelf, that had been built for them to jump on, and every one of them was snarling at Duke.

I don’t know if you ever saw a wildcat, but they are about twice as big as a house cat, brindle gray, with tufted ears and a bobbed tail. When they set and look at you they look like a owl, but they wasn’t setting and looking now. They was marching around, coughing and spitting, their eyes shooting red and green fire, and it was a ugly sight, ’specially with that bloody dead one down on the ground. Duke was pale, and the breath was whistling through his nose, and it didn’t take no doctor to see he was scared to death.

“You better bury that cat,” he says to me. “I’ll take care of the cars.”

I looked through the wire and he grabbed me. “Look out!” he says. “They’d kill you in a minute.”

“In that case,” I says, “how do I get the cat out?”

“You’ll have to get a stick,” he says, and shoves off.

I was pretty sore, but I begun looking around for a stick. I found one, but when I got back to the cage Lura was there. “How did that happen?” she says.

“I don’t know,” I says, “but I can tell you this much: If there’s any more of them to be buried around here, you can get somebody else to do it. My job is to fix flats, and I’m not going to be no cat undertaker.”

She didn’t have nothing to say to that. She just stood there while I was trying the stick, and I could hear her toe snapping up and down in the sand, and from that I knowed she was choking it back, what she really thought, and didn’t think no more of this here cat idea than I did.

The stick was too short. “My,” she says, pretty disagreeable, “that looks terrible. You can’t bring people out here with a thing like that in there.”

“All right,” I snapped back. “Find me a stick.”

She didn’t make no move to find no stick. She put her hand on the gate. “Hold on,” I says. “Them things are nothing to monkey with.”

“Huh,” she says. “All they look like to me is a bunch of cats.”

There was a kennel back of the cage, with a drop door on it, where they was supposed to go at night. How you got them back there was bait them with food, but I didn’t know that then. I yelled at them, to drive them back in there, but nothing happened. All they done was yell back. Lura listened to me awhile, and then she give a kind of gasp like she couldn’t stand it no longer, opened the gate, and went in.

Now believe me, that next was a bad five minutes, because she wasn’t hard to look at, and I hated to think of her getting mauled up by them babies. But a guy would of had to of been blind if it didn’t show him that she had a way with cats. First thing she done, when she got in, she stood still, didn’t make no sudden motions or nothing, and begun to talk to them. Not no special talk. Just “Pretty pussy, what’s the matter, what they been doing to you?” — like that. Then she went over to them.

They slid off, on their bellies, to another part of the shelf. But she kept after them, and got her hand on one, and stroked him on the back. Then she got ahold of another one, and pretty soon she had give them all a pat. Then she turned around, picked up the dead cat by one leg, and come out with him. I put him on the wheelbarrow and buried him.

Now, why was it that Lura kept it from Duke how easy she had got the cat out and even about being in the cage at all? I think it was just because she didn’t have the heart to show him up to hisself how silly he looked. Anyway, at supper that night, she never said a word. Duke, he was nervous and excited and told all about how the cats had jumped at him and how he had to bean one to save his life, and then he give a long spiel about cats and how fear is the only thing they understand, so you would of thought he was Martin Johnson just back from the jungle or something.

But it seemed to me the dishes was making quite a noise that night, clattering around on the table, and that was funny, because one thing you could say for Lura was: she was quiet and easy to be around. So when Duke, just like it was nothing at all, asks me by the way how did I get the cat out, I heared my mouth saying, “With a stick,” and not nothing more. A little bird flies around and tells you, at a time like that. Lura let it pass. Never said a word. And if you ask me, Duke never did find out how easy she could handle the cats, and that ain’t only guesswork, but on account of something that happened a little while afterward, when we got the mountain lion.

A mountain lion is a cougar, only out here they call them a mountain lion. Well, one afternoon about five o’clock this one of ours squat down on her hunkers and set up the worst squalling you ever listen to. She kept it up all night, so you wanted to go out and shoot her, and next morning at breakfast Duke come running in and says come on out and look what happened. So we went out there, and there in the cage with her was the prettiest he mountain lion you ever seen in your life. He was big, probably weighed a hundred and fifty pounds, and his coat was a pearl gray so glossy it looked like a pair of new gloves, and he had a spot of white on his throat. Sometimes they have white.

“He come down from the hills when he heard her call last night,” says Duke, “and he got in there somehow. Ain’t it funny? When they hear that note nothing can stop them.”

“Yeah,” I says. “It’s love.”

“That’s it,” says Duke. “Well, we’ll be having some little ones soon. Cheaper’n buying them.”

After he had went off to town to buy the stuff for the day, Lura sat down to the table with me. “Nice of you,” I says, “to let Romeo in last night.”

“Romeo?” she says.

“Yes, Romeo. That’s going to be papa of twins soon, out in the lion cage.”

“Oh,” she says, “didn’t he get in there himself?”

“He did not. If she couldn’t get out, how could he get in?”

All she give me at that time was a dead pan. Didn’t know nothing about it at all. Fact of the matter, she made me a little sore. But after she brung me my second cup of coffee she kind of smiled. “Well?” she says. “You wouldn’t keep two loving hearts apart, would you?”

So things was, like you might say, a little gritty, but they got a whole lot worse when Duke come home with Rajah, the tiger. Because by that time he had told so many lies that he begun to believe them hisself, and put on all the airs of a big animal trainer. When people come out on Sundays, he would take a black snake whip and go in with the mountain lions and wildcats, and snap it at them, and they would snarl and yowl, and Duke acted like he was doing something. Before he went in, he would let the people see him strapping on a big six-shooter, and Lura got sorer by the week.

For one thing, he looked so silly. She couldn’t see nothing to going in with the cats, and ’specially she couldn’t see no sense in going in with a whip, a six-shooter, and a ten-gallon hat like them cow people wears. And for another thing, it was bad for business. In the beginning, when Lura would take the customers’ kids out and make out the cat had their finger, they loved it, and they loved it still more when the little mountain lions come and they had spots and would push up their ears to be scratched. But when Duke started that stuff with the whip it scared them to death, and even the fathers and mothers was nervous, because there was the gun and they didn’t know what would happen next. So business begun to fall off.

And then one afternoon he put down a couple of drinks and figured it was time for him to go in there with Rajah. Now it had took Lura one minute to tame Rajah. She was in there sweeping out his cage one morning when Duke was away, and when he started sliding around on his belly he got a bucket of water in the face, and that was that. From then on he was her cat. But what happened when Duke tried to tame him was awful. The first I knew what he was up to was when he made a speech to the people from the mountain lion cage telling them not to go away yet, there was more to come. And when he come out he headed over to the tiger.

“What’s the big idea?” I says. “What you up to now?”

“I’m going in with that tiger,” he says. “It’s got to be done, and I might as well do it now.”

“Why has it got to be done?” I says.

He looked at me like as though he pitied me.

“I guess there’s a few things about cats you don’t know yet,” he says. “You got a tiger on your hands, you got to let him know who’s boss, that’s all.”

“Yeah?” I says. “And who is boss?”

“You see that?” he says, and cocks his finger at his face.

“See what?” I says.

“The human eye,” he says. “The human eye, that’s all. A cat’s afraid of it. And if you know your business, you’ll keep him afraid of it. That’s all I’ll use, the human eye. But, of course, just for protection, I’ve got these too.”

“Listen, sweetheart,” I says to him. “If you give me a choice between the human eye and a Bengal tiger, which one I got the most fear of, you’re going to see a guy getting a shiner every time. If I was you, I’d lay off that cat.”

He didn’t say nothing: hitched up his holster, and went in. He didn’t even get a chance to unlimber his whip. That tiger, soon as he saw him, begun to move around in a way that made your blood run cold. He didn’t make for Duke first, you understand. He slid over, and in a second he was between Duke and the gate. That’s one thing about a tiger you better not forget if you ever meet one. He can’t work examples in arithmetic, but when it comes to the kinds of brains that mean meat, he’s the brightest boy in the class and then some. He’s born knowing more about cutting off a retreat than you’ll ever know, and his legs do it for him, just automatic, so his jaws will be free for the main business of the meeting.

Duke backed away, and his face was awful to see. He was straining every muscle to keep his mouth from sliding down in his collar. His left hand fingered the whip a little, and his right pawed around, like he had some idea of drawing the gun. But the tiger didn’t give him time to make up his mind what his idea was, if any.

He would slide a few feet on his belly, then get up and trot a step or two, then slide on his belly again. He didn’t make no noise, you understand. He wasn’t telling Duke, “Please go away”; he meant to kill him, and a killer don’t generally make no more fuss than he has to. So for a few seconds you could even hear Duke’s feet sliding over the floor. But all of a sudden a kid begun to whimper, and I come to my senses. I run around to the back of the cage, because that was where the tiger was crowding him, and I yelled at him.

“Duke!” I says. “In his kennel! Quick!”

He didn’t seem to hear me. He was still backing, and the tiger was still coming. A woman screamed. The tiger’s head went down, he crouched on the ground, and tightened every muscle. I knew what that meant. Everybody knew what it meant, and ’specially Duke knew what it meant. He made a funny sound in his throat, turned, and ran.

That was when the tiger sprung. Duke had no idea where he was going, but when he turned he fell through the trapdoor and I snapped it down. The tiger hit it so hard I thought it would split. One of Duke’s legs was out, and the tiger was on it in a flash, but all he got on that grab was the sole of Duke’s shoe. Duke got his leg in somehow and I jammed the door down tight.

It was a sweet time at supper that night. Lura didn’t see this here, because she was busy in the lunchroom when it happened, but them people had talked on their way out, and she knowed all about it. What she said was plenty. And Duke, what do you think he done? He passed it off like it wasn’t nothing at all. “Just one of them things you got to expect,” he says. And then he let on he knowed what he was doing all the time, and the only lucky part of it was that he didn’t have to shoot a valuable animal like Rajah was. “Keep cool, that’s the main thing,” he says. “A thing like that can happen now and then, but never let a animal see you excited.”

I heard him, and I couldn’t believe my ears, but when I looked at Lura I jumped. I think I told you she wasn’t hard to look at. She was a kind of medium size, with a shape that would make a guy leave his happy home, sunburned all over, and high cheekbones that give her eyes a funny slant. But her eyes was narrowed down to slits, looking at Duke, and they shot green where the light hit them, and it come over me all of a sudden that she looked so much like Rajah, when he was closing in on Duke in the afternoon, that she could of been his twin sister.

Next off, Duke got it in his head he was such a big cat man now that he had to go up in the hills and do some trapping. Bring in his own stuff, he called it.

I didn’t pay much attention to it at the time. Of course, he never brought in no stuff, except a couple of raccoons that he probably bought down the road for two dollars, but Duke was the kind of a guy that every once in a while has to sit on a rock and fish, so when he loaded up the flivver and blew, it wasn’t nothing you would get excited about. Maybe I didn’t really care what he was up to, because it was pretty nice, running the place with Lura with him out of the way, and I didn’t ask no questions. But it was more to it than cats or ’coons or fish, and Lura knowed it, even if I didn’t.

Anyhow, it was while he was away on one of them trips of his that Wild Bill Smith, the Texas Tornado, showed up. Bill was a snake doctor. He had a truck, with his picture painted on it, and two or three boxes of old rattlesnakes with their teeth pulled out, and he sold snake oil that would cure what ailed you, and a Indian herb medicine that would do the same. He was a fake, but he was big and brown and had white teeth, and I guess he really wasn’t no bad guy. The first I seen of him was when he drove up in his truck, and told me to gas him up and look at his tires. He had a bum differential that made a funny rattle, but he said never mind and went over to the lunchroom.

He was there a long time, and I thought I better let him know his car was ready. When I went over there, he was setting on a stool with a sheepish look on his face, rubbing his hand. He had a snake ring on one finger, with two red eyes, and on the back of his hand was red streaks. I knew what that meant. He had started something and Lura had fixed him. She had a pretty arm, but a grip like iron, that she said come from milking cows when she was a kid. What she done when a guy got fresh was take hold of his hand and squeeze it so the bones cracked, and he generally changed his mind.

She handed him his check without a word, and I told him what he owed on the car, and he paid up and left.

“So you settled his hash, hey?” I says to her.

“If there’s one thing gets on my nerves,” she says, “it’s a man that starts something the minute he gets in the door.”

“Why didn’t you yell for me?”

“Oh, I didn’t need no help.”

But the next day he was back, and after I filled up his car I went over to see how he was behaving. He was setting at one of the tables this time, and Lura was standing beside him. I saw her jerk her hand away quick, and he give me the bright grin a man has when he’s got something he wants to cover up. He was all teeth. “Nice day,” he says. “Great weather you have in this country,”

“So I hear,” I says. “Your car’s ready.”

“What I owe you?” he says.

“Dollar twenty.”

He counted it out and left.

“Listen,” says Lura, “we weren’t doing anything when you come in. He was just reading my hand. He’s a snake doctor, and knows about the zodiac.”

“Oh, wasn’t we?” I says. “Well, wasn’t we nice!”

“What’s it to you?” she says.

“Nothing,” I snapped at her. I was pretty sore.

“He says I was born under the sign of Yin,” she says. You would of thought it was a piece of news fit to put in the paper.

“And who is Yin?” I says.

“It’s Chinese for tiger,” she says.

“Then bite yourself off a piece of raw meat,” I says, and slammed out of there. We didn’t have no nice time running the joint that day.

Next morning he was back. I kept away from the lunchroom, but I took a stroll and seen them back there with the tigers. We had hauled a tree in there by that time for Rajah to sharpen his claws on, and she was setting on that. The tiger had his head in her lap, and Wild Bill was looking through the wire. He couldn’t even draw his breath. I didn’t go near enough to hear what they was saying. I went back to the car and begin blowing the horn.

He was back quite a few times after that, in between while Duke was away. Then one night I heard a truck drive up. I knowed that truck by its rattle. And it was daylight before I heard it go away.

Couple weeks after that, Duke come running over to me at the filling station. “Shake hands with me,” he says, “I’m going to be a father.”

“Gee,” I says, “that’s great!”

But I took good care he wasn’t around when I mentioned it to Lura.

“Congratulations,” I says. “Letting Romeos into the place seems to be about the best thing you do.”

“What do you mean?” she says.

“Nothing,” I says. “Only I heard him drive up that night. Look like to me the moon was under the sign of Cupid. Well, it’s nice if you can get away with it.”

“Oh,” she says.

“Yeah,” I says. “A fine double cross you thought up. I didn’t know they tried that any more.”

She set and looked at me, and then her mouth begin to twitch and her eyes filled with tears. She tried to snuffle them up but it didn’t work. “It’s not any double cross,” she says. “That night I never went out there. And I never let anybody in. I was supposed to go away with him that night, but—”

She broke off and begin to cry. I took her in my arms. “But then you found this out?” I says. “Is that it?” She nodded her head. It’s awful to have a pretty woman in your arms that’s crying over somebody else.

From then on, it was terrible. Lura would go along two or three days pretty well, trying to like Duke again on account of the baby coming, but then would come a day when she looked like some kind of a hex, with her eyes all sunk in so you could hardly see them at all, and not a word out of her.

Them bad days, anyhow when Duke wasn’t around, she would spend with the tiger. She would set and watch him sleep, or maybe play with him, and he seemed to like it as much as she did. He was young when we got him, and mangy and thin, so you could see his slats. But now he was about six years old, and had been fed good, so he had got his growth, and his coat was nice, and I think he was the biggest tiger I ever seen. A tiger, when he is really big, is a lot bigger than a lion, and sometimes when Rajah would be rubbing around Lura, he looked more like a mule than a cat.

His shoulders come up above her waist, and his head was so big it would cover both legs when he put it in her lap. When his tail would go sliding past her it looked like some kind of a constrictor snake. His teeth were something to make you lie awake nights. A tiger has the biggest teeth of any cat, and Rajah’s must have been four inches long, curved like a cavalry sword, and ivory white. They were the most murderous-looking fangs I ever set eyes on.

When Lura went to the hospital it was a hurry call, and she didn’t even have time to get her clothes together. Next day Duke had to pack her bag, and he was strutting around, because it was a boy, and Lura had named him Ron. But when he come out with the bag he didn’t have much of a strut. “Look what I found,” he says to me, and fishes something out of his pocket. It was the snake ring.

“Well?” I says. “They sell them in any ten-cent store.”

“H’m,” he says, and kind of weighed the ring in his hand. That afternoon, when he come back, he says: “Ten-cent store, hey? I took it to a jeweler today, and he offered me two hundred dollars for it.”

“You ought to sold it,” I says. “Maybe save you bad luck.”

Duke went away again right after Lura come back, and for a little while things was all right. She was crazy about the little boy, and I thought he was pretty cute myself, and we got along fine. But then Duke come back and at lunch one day he made a crack about the ring. Lura didn’t say nothing, but he kept at it, and pretty soon she wheeled on him.

“All right,” she says. “There was another man around here, and I loved him. He give me that ring, and it meant that he and I belonged to each other. But I didn’t go with him, and you know why I didn’t. For Ron’s sake, I’ve tried to love you again, and maybe I can yet, God knows. A woman can do some funny things if she tries. But that’s where we’re at now. That’s right where we’re at. And if you don’t like it, you better say what you’re going to do.”

“When was this?” says Duke.

“It was quite a while ago. I told you I give him up, and I give him up for keeps.”

“It was just before you knowed about Ron, wasn’t it?” he says.

“Hey,” I cut in. “That’s no way to talk.”

“Just what I thought,” he says, not paying no attention to me. “Ron. That’s a funny name for a kid. I thought it was funny, right off when I heard it. Ron. Ron. That’s a laugh, ain’t it?”

“That’s a lie,” she says. “That’s a lie, every bit of it. And it’s not the only lie you’ve been getting away with around here. Or think you have. Trapping up in the hills, hey? And what do you trap?”

But she looked at me and choked it back. I begun to see that the cats wasn’t the only things had been gumming it up.

“All right,” she wound up. “Say what you’re going to do. Go on. Say it!”

But he didn’t.

“Ron,” he cackles, “that’s a hot one,” and walks out.

Next day was Saturday, and he acted funny all day. He wouldn’t speak to me or Lura, and once or twice I heard him mumbling to himself. Right after supper he says to me, “How are we on oil?”

“All right,” I says. “The truck was around yesterday.”

“You better drive in and get some,” he says. “I don’t think we got enough.”

“Enough?” I says. “We got enough for two weeks.”

“Tomorrow is Sunday,” he says, “and there’ll be a big call for it. Bring out a hundred gallon and tell them to put it on the account.”

By that time I would give in to one of his nutty ideas rather than have an argument with him, and besides, I never tumbled that he was up to anything. So I wasn’t there for what happened next, but I got it out of Lura later, so here is how it was:

Lura didn’t pay much attention to the argument about the oil, but washed up the supper dishes, and then went in the bedroom to make sure everything was all right with the baby. When she come out she left the door open, so she could hear if he cried. The bedroom was off the sitting room, because these here California houses don’t have but one floor, and all the rooms connect. Then she lit the fire, because it was cool, and sat there watching it burn. Duke come in, walked around, and then went out back. “Close the door,” she says to him. “I’ll be right back,” he says.

So she sat looking at the fire, she didn’t know how long, maybe five minutes, maybe ten minutes. But pretty soon she felt the house shake. She thought maybe it was a earthquake, and looked at the pictures, but they was all hanging straight. Then she felt the house shake again. She listened, but it wasn’t no truck outside that would cause it, and it wouldn’t be no state-road blasting or nothing like that at that time of night. Then she felt it shake again, and this time it shook in a regular movement, one, two, three, four, like that. And then all of a sudden she knew what it was, why Duke had acted so funny all day, why he had sent me off for the oil, why he had left the door open, and all the rest of it. There was five hundred pound of cat walking through the house, and Duke had turned him loose to kill her.

She turned around, and Rajah was looking at her, not five foot away. She didn’t do nothing for a minute, just set there thinking what a boob Duke was to figure on the tiger doing his dirty work for him, when all the time she could handle him easy as a kitten, only Duke didn’t know it. Then she spoke. She expected Rajah to come and put his head in her lap, but he didn’t. He stood there and growled, and his ears flattened back. That scared her, and she thought of the baby. I told you a tiger has that kind of brains. It no sooner went through her head about the baby than Rajah knowed she wanted to get to that door, and he was over there before she could get out of the chair.

He was snarling in a regular roar now, but he hadn’t got a whiff of the baby yet, and he was still facing Lura. She could see he meant business. She reached in the fireplace, grabbed a stick that was burning bright, and walked him down with it. A tiger is afraid of fire, and she shoved it right in his eyes. He backed past the door, and she slid in the bedroom. But he was right after her, and she had to hold the stick at him with one hand and grab her baby with the other.

But she couldn’t get out. He had her cornered, and he was kicking up such a awful fuss she knowed the stick wouldn’t stop him long. So she dropped it, grabbed up the baby’s covers, and threw them at his head. They went wild, but they saved her just the same. A tiger, if you throw something at him with a human smell, will generally jump on it and bite at it before he does anything else, and that’s what he done now. He jumped so hard the rug went out from under him, and while he was scrambling to his feet she shot past him with the baby and pulled the door shut after her.

She run in my room, got a blanket, wrapped the baby in it, and run out to the electric icebox. It was the only thing around the place that was steel. Soon as she opened the door she knowed why she couldn’t do nothing with Rajah. His meat was in there; Duke hadn’t fed him. She pulled the meat out, shoved the baby in, cut off the current, and closed the door. Then she picked up the meat and went around the outside of the house to the window of the bedroom. She could see Rajah in there, biting at the top of the door, where a crack of light showed through. He reached to the ceiling. She took a grip on the meat and drove at the screen with it. It give way, and the meat went through. He was on it before it hit the floor.

Next thing was to give him time to eat. She figured she could handle him once he got something in his belly. She went back to the sitting room. And in there, kind of peering around, was Duke. He had his gun strapped on, and one look at his face was all she needed to know she hadn’t made no mistake about why the tiger was loose.

“Oh,” he says, kind of foolish, and then walked back and closed the door. “I meant to come back sooner, but I couldn’t help looking at the night. You got no idea how beautiful it is. Stars is bright as anything.”

“Yeah,” she says. “I noticed.”

“Beautiful,” he says. “Beautiful.”

“Was you expecting burglars or something?” she says, looking at the gun.

“Oh, that,” he says. “No. Cat’s been kicking up a fuss. I put it on, case I have to go back there. Always like to have it handy.”

“The tiger,” she says. “I thought I heard him, myself.”

“Loud,” says Duke. “Awful loud.”

He waited. She waited. She wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of opening up first. But just then there come a growl from the bedroom, and the sound of bones cracking. A tiger acts awful sore when he eats. “What’s that?” says Duke.

“I wonder,” says Lura. She was hell-bent on making him spill it first.

They both looked at each other, and then there was more growls, and more sound of cracking bones. “You better go in there,” says Duke, soft and easy, with the sweat standing out on his forehead and his eyes shining bright as marbles. “Something might be happening to Ron.”

“Do you know what I think it is?” says Lura.

“What’s that?” says Duke. His breath was whistling through his nose like it always done when he got excited.

“I think it’s that tiger you sent in here to kill me,” says Lura. “So you could bring in that woman you been running around with for over a year. That redhead that raises rabbit fryers on the Ventura road. That cat you been trapping!”

“And ’stead of getting you he got Ron,” says Duke. “Little Ron! Oh my, ain’t that tough? Go in there, why don’t you? Ain’t you got no mother love? Why don’t you call up his pappy, get him in there? What’s the matter? Is he afraid of a cat?”

Lura laughed at him. “All right,” she says. “Now you go.” With that she took hold of him. He tried to draw the gun, but she crumpled up his hand like a piece of wet paper and the gun fell on the floor. She bent him back on the table and beat his face in for him. Then she picked him up, dragged him to the front door, and threw him out. He run off a little ways. She come back and saw the gun. She picked it up, went to the door again, and threw it after him. “And take that peashooter with you,” she says.

That was where she made her big mistake. When she turned to go back to the house, he shot, and that was the last she knew for a while.

Now, for what happened next, it wasn’t nobody there, only Duke and the tiger, but after them state cops got done fitting it all together, combing the ruins and all, it wasn’t no trouble to tell how it was, anyway most of it, and here’s how they figured it out:

Soon as Duke seen Lura fall, right there in front of the house, he knowed he was up against it. So the first thing he done was run to where she was and put the gun in her hand, to make it look like she had shot herself. That was where he made his mistake, because if he had kept the gun he might of had a chance. Then he went inside to telephone, and what he said was, soon as he got hold of the state police: “For God’s sake come out here quick. My wife has went crazy and throwed the baby to the tiger and shot herself and I’m all alone in the house with him and — oh, my God, here he comes!”

Now that last was something he didn’t figure on saying. So far as he knowed, the tiger was in the room, having a nice meal off his son, so everything was hotsy-totsy. But what he didn’t know was that that piece of burning firewood that Lura had dropped had set the room on fire and on account of that the tiger had got out. How did he get out? We never did quite figure that out. But this is how I figure it, and one man’s guess is good as another’s:

The fire started near the window, we knew that much. That was where Lura dropped the stick, right next to the cradle, and that was where a guy coming down the road in a car first seen the flames. And what I think is that soon as the tiger got his eye off the meat and seen the fire, he begun to scramble away from it, just wild. And when a wild tiger hits a beaverboard wall, he goes through, that’s all. While Duke was telephoning, Rajah come through the wall like a clown through a hoop, and the first thing he seen was Duke, at the telephone, and Duke wasn’t no friend, not to Rajah he wasn’t

Anyway, that’s how things was when I got there with the oil. The state cops was a little ahead of me, and I met the ambulance with Lura in it, coming down the road seventy mile an hour, but just figured there had been a crash up the road, and didn’t know nothing about it having Lura in it. And when I drove up, there was plenty to look at all right. The house was in flames, and the police was trying to get in, but couldn’t get nowheres near it on account of the heat, and about a hundred cars parked all around, with people looking, and a gasoline pumper cruising up and down the road, trying to find a water connection somewhere they could screw their hose to.

But inside the house was the terrible part. You could hear Duke screaming, and in between Duke was the tiger. And both of them was screams of fear, but I think the tiger was worse. It is a awful thing to hear a animal letting out a sound like that. It kept up about five minutes after I got there, and then all of a sudden you couldn’t hear nothing but the tiger. And then in a minute that stopped.

There wasn’t nothing to do about the fire. In a half hour the whole place was gone, and they was combing the ruins for Duke. Well, they found him. And in his head was four holes, two on each side, deep. We measured them fangs of the tiger. They just fit.

Soon as I could I run in to the hospital. They had got the bullet out by that time, and Lura was laying in bed all bandaged around the head, but there was a guard over her, on account of what Duke said over the telephone. He was a state cop. I sat down with him, and he didn’t like it none. Neither did I. I knowed there was something funny about it, but what broke your heart was Lura, coming out of the ether. She would groan and mutter and try to say something so hard it would make your head ache. After a while I got up and went in the hall. But then I see the state cop shoot out of the room and line down the hall as fast as he could go. At last she had said it. The baby was in the electric icebox. They found him there, still asleep and just about ready for his milk. The fire had blacked up the outside, but inside it was as cool and nice as a new bathtub.

Well, that was about all. They cleared Lura, soon as she told her story, and the baby in the icebox proved it. Soon as she got out of the hospital she got a offer from the movies, but ’stead of taking it she come out to the place and her and I run it for a while, anyway the filling-station end, sleeping in the shacks and getting along nice. But one night I heard a rattle from a bum differential, and I never even bothered to show up for breakfast the next morning.

I often wish I had. Maybe she left me a note.

The Birthday Party

He bounced the tennis ball against the garage with persistence, but no enthusiasm. He would have gone swimming, but Red would be there, and he owed Red ten cents. Red drove the ice-cream truck evenings, and so swam in midafternoon; debtors, therefore, used the creek mornings, late afternoons, and, if there was a moon, nights. Between times they passed away the hours bouncing tennis balls against garages.

He bounced the ball with sudden zeal. There had come a call from the house: “Burwell!” It was repeated, twice, and then amended: “Burwell Hope!”

He slowed the tempo. “You call me, ma?”

“I don’t see why you can’t answer when I call.”

“I was practicing strokes,” he told her.

“Well, don’t stand there yelling so the whole neighborhood can hear you; and, besides, I don’t think that’s any place for practicing strokes. It makes an awful noise and I don’t wonder people are annoyed.”

He slouched slowly into the house, practicing a trick that involved mashing the ball into the ground, hitting it with the edge of the racket as it sprang up, and catching it in the pants pocket as it bounced waist-high.

“Have you bathed?”

“It’s too hot to bathe now. I’ll be all perspired up again. I’ll bathe after supper.”

“You ought to bathe now.”

“It’s too hot.”

“Did you black your shoes as I told you?”

“Not yet.”

“Not yet, what?”

“Not yet, ma.”

“Well, there’s the pen and ink; sit down and write the card now so I can wrap it up. I’ve got a minute now and I don’t want to have to think about it later.”

“Wrap what up?”

“Burwell, how many times have I got to tell you you must stop this habit of asking useless questions? It’s annoying, and you have to stop it. Marjorie’s birthday present, of course. I can’t wrap it up until I have the card, and you’re giving it to her, so you have to write the card.”

“I’m not giving it to her. I don’t even know what it is.”

“It’s a very nice bottle of perfume. Want to see it?”

“Phooie!”

“Stop — using — that — word!”

“I don’t want to see it.”

“Very well. Then as soon as you write the card you can black your shoes.”

“What for?”

“Will you stop asking those useless questions! For the party, of course. Didn’t I tell you? Answer me. Didn’t I tell you not two hours ago that Mrs. Lucas stopped by, told me they were giving a little surprise party for Marjorie tonight because it’s her birthday, and that she especially wanted you to be there? Didn’t I tell you that?”

“I’m not going.”

“You’re—”

“Sure, you told me, but I never said I would go.”

“Why, Burwell Hope, the very idea. And after Mrs. Lucas said she especially wanted you to go. And after I made a trip downtown to buy a nice present. Why, I never heard of such a thing. All her friends are going. Spencer, and Jackie, and Junior LeCrand, and—”

“Bunch of sissies.”

“Is every boy a sissy that has some kind of manners and does what his mother tells him to once in a while without always having to argue?”

“I’m not going.”

“What will Marjorie think?”

“Marjorie Lucas. The belle of Home Room Twenty-nine.”

“Why do you always have to be so mean to Marjorie? What has she ever done to you?”

“The face that only a mother could love.”

“I haven’t time to stand around and argue with you. You write the card right now — ‘Happy Birthday to Marjorie from Burwell’ — and then you go out and black your shoes. They’re on the back porch, and there’s a new can of blacking in the things that came up from the market.”

He wrote the card, then went out on the back porch and looked at his shoes. Then he looked at the sun. Then he looked at the sun again, making certain calculations based on its position in the heavens and its relation to the general progress of the afternoon. Then he drifted into the backyard, took his swimming suit off the line, and slipped quickly through the hole in the hedge.

The creek was deserted, but damp spots on the boat landing showed that Red, to say nothing of his more solvent customers, wasn’t long gone. Burwell peeled off his clothes, had a moment of wild determination to go in naked, but compromised on trunks, without shirt. The water felt queer, and all his tricks seemed shriveled: He kept opening his mouth to yell, “Hey, look at this one,” but there was nobody to look. He tried a back dive, but all he got out of it was a pair of smarting shins, where they slapped the water as he came over. He tried a feat of his own, for which he imagined he had acquired quite a local reputation: to go down under and stay down under, with only his feet sticking out; but something seemed to be wrong with it. As a rule, he could stay down under at least five minutes — or, at any rate, so he frequently asserted, in the absence of any watch to time him, and in the absence also of any knowledge that even one minute is a prodigious time for holding the breath; but now, for some unexplainable reason, he was no sooner down than he had to come up again, puffing grievously.

Treading water, about to try again, he felt a tingle in his back: somebody, he knew, was watching him. This time, as he lazily flipped himself under, all was as it should be. He stayed down at least ten minutes, crossing his feet as they stuck out in the air, wiggling his toes, sending up bubbles, and in other ways putting in subtle artistic touches. When he came up he tossed the hair out of his eyes nonchalantly and breathed through his nose — to conceal the puffing, and to show that, staggering though the performance might be, it had been done with ease.

Marjorie was on the boat landing. “Hello.”

“Hello.”

“My, but you scared me.”

“Me scare you?”

“I thought something had happened to you. When I saw your toes wiggle I thought something had you. I thought I would die.”

“Oh, that. That wasn’t nothing.”

He put his face in the water and blew through his mouth, at the same time uttering loud noises. He conceived this to be a peculiarly terrifying experience for the beholder.

However, she didn’t seem to be paying much attention. “I wish I could go in.”

“Well, come on.”

“I didn’t bring my suit.”

He became a steamboat, churning up a great deal of foam, but stopped when she wandered into the canoe house. When she came out she had his swimming shirt.

“Are you going to be wearing this?”

“Only sissies wear shirts.”

“I could pin it at the bottom. It’s pretty big for me, and I could pin it so it would be all right.”

“I don’t mind.”

She went back into the canoe house again, and he began doing all his tricks, one after the other. Presently she came out, a bit suggestive of diapers and safety pins here and there, but in the main clad neatly in a one-piece bathing suit, made of his shirt. He let go with a jackknife; then climbed out with an air of triumph mixed with boredom.

She climbed down the cleats and felt the water with one toe.

“What’s the matter? You scared?”

“I’m not scared. But I always like to know if it’s cold or not.”

“You’re scared.”

“Well, I always am. A little.”

“If you’re scared, you’ve got to dive in.”

“I’m going to.”

“Well, why don’t you?”

“I’m going to. In a minute.”

He had a moment of vast, soul-warming contempt, but it congealed within him to a drop of bitter, cruel gall. She was climbing the piling. He watched her, stunned, saw her poise far above his head, then go off and cut the water so cleanly that only a high spurt of foam marked her entering it.

Nobody had told him that little girls dive better than little boys. Nobody had told him that little girls could possibly do anything better than little boys. All he knew was that he had never had the nerve to climb the piling and dive off, and here she had done it; and not only done it, but done it, apparently, without even knowing that it was hard.

He jumped up, as soon as her head came out of the water, and yelled at her: “So you think you’re smart, hey? That’s nothing. I can do it too. I’ve done it plenty of times. I can even do a back dive from up there.”

“Can you really?”

She said it with honest admiration, and he climbed up. But when he got there a sick feeling swept down his throat and into his stomach. It was higher than he imagined. It was higher than he had ever imagined anything could be. The water was way, way down, far removed from anything that he could possibly dive into.

He tried to get set for a dive, but couldn’t even stand up. All he could do was squat there, holding the tops of the piles with his hands, and gulp.

“If you’re scared,” she said, “you’ve got to dive in.”

The ancient apothegm, quoted so blandly by himself not two minutes ago, was spoken innocently, yet it floated up from the water with a terrible mockery.

“Who’s scared?”

“Well, my goodness, anybody can be scared.”

“I’m not scared. I’m just taking it easy.”

“It just comes from being dizzy.”

“Why don’t you kick your feet when you swim? That’s no way to swim. Why don’t you kick your feet like I do?”

“I can’t swim very well, but I like to dive.”

“Well, anybody can dive. Swimming’s the important thing. If you can swim good you might save somebody from drowning, but what good is diving?”

“Maybe if you sat down on the big pile and then let go, it would be like jumping off.”

“Who’s asking you?”

She climbed up beside him. “What makes you dizzy is looking down. Why don’t you look up at the sky and try it? like this.”

She threw back her head, gripped the pile with her toes, stiffened, sprang. But he didn’t see her swash into the water. The pilings shuddered so sickeningly from her leap that he had to clutch them tight with his fingers, looking cravenly into the cracks of the wood. When the swaying stopped he looked up at the sky and tried to stand. He couldn’t. She climbed up there again. This time she turned her back to the water, leaned out. He knew it was a back dive, but he didn’t see that one either. She stretched herself out on the boat landing to rest, and there was nothing he could do but climb down. He was panting when he reached her, not from exertion, but from rage.

“I know what you’re doing here. I know why you’re not home. It’s your birthday, and they’re giving you a surprise party, and they ran you out of the house so you wouldn’t see them getting ready for it. Yah! Got run out of the house. Yah!”

“I knew it all the time, but I think it was mean of you to tell me.”

“Whole lot of cake and stuff coming in and they didn’t want you to see it. Bum old cake from the bakery.”

“It’s not bum old cake. It’s a special birthday cake with my name on it in icing.”

“How do you know?”

“I peeped and saw it. It’s going to have candles on it and they’re going to bring it out in front of everybody and then I’m going to cut it.”

“Old stale cake they had left over from last week and then they put your name on it in icing.”

“It is not.”

“Phooie!” He spat in the water and sat there laughing, mumbling, and shaking his head, as though the ignoble tricks of the whole human race were quite beyond him.

She sat up and began to fluff out her hair. “Are you invited, Burwell?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know?”

“I kind of said one or two things so they wouldn’t forget to invite you.”

“Wouldn’t you like to know?”

“Are you coming?”

“Is that a laugh! Is that a laugh!”

“I don’t see anything funny.”

“Am I coming? Say, is that a laugh! Me come to a bum birthday party with a lot of sissies and an old stale cake the bakery couldn’t give away but your old man came and bought it cheap and had your name put on it in icing. Well! Is that a laugh!”

“Aren’t you really coming, Burwell?”

“Who, me?”

“I was going to give you the first piece of cake.”

“That stale stuff.”

“Tell me, Burwell. Why aren’t you coming?”

“Phooie! I’m busy.”

“How do you mean, busy?”

“Don’t you wish you knew? Don’t you wish you knew?”

She looked at him and he had a sensation of having to think fast. “Are you really busy, Burwell?”

“Sure, I’m busy.”

“Doing what?”

“Why — I got to work.”

The agreeable degree of her astonishment surprised even him. “Have you got a job, Burwell?”

“Sure I got a job.”

“What kind of a job? Tell me.”

“Helping Red.”

Now this wasn’t true. The only relation it had to truth was that he had been considering a plan whereby he would offer to help Red for a night or two, in return for the extinguishment of the ten-cent debt. But actually he had made no such offer, and whether he would ever make it was problematical for Red was a brisk young man, rather hard to talk to, despite his professional affability.

“Honest?”

“Busy guy these days. Me go to a party? Say, is that a laugh!”

“I haven’t seen you with Red.”

“I’m inside the truck.”

“What doing?”

“Oh, lot of things.”

“Tell me.”

“Well, I pass out the stuff to him. Drive the old bus, so he don’t all the time have to be jumping in and out, saves him a lot of time. Keep things going. Ring up the cash. Lot of things.”

“Do you get paid for it?”

“You think I’m doing all that for nothing?”

“Well, I didn’t know. I thought he might just give you ice cream. You know. A free cake if you wanted it.”

“A fat chance.”

“When did you start?”

“Oh, I don’t just remember. I’ve been at it quite a while. Maybe a week.”

“Just think! And I didn’t know a thing about it.”

He rather fancied his new job now. As a matter of fact, the truck had a wheel that had always taken his eye; it was a big, horizontal wheel, something like the wheel on the rear end of a hook-and-ladder, and there now leaped into his mind a picture of himself behind it.

“Say, you ought to see me in there, swinging her around corners, dodging traffic, shooting her up beside the curb, ringing the bell — I forgot that. I’m the one that rings the bell.”

He acted it out, his feet hanging over the water, his hands caressing the wheel. He shifted gears, pedaled the brake, sounded the bell, pulled up short just in time to avoid a collision with a lady pushing a gocart containing an infant, went on with a noble, though worried, look on his face. A captious listener might have reflected that evening was a strange time for infants to be abroad in gocarts; might have taken exception, too, to a certain discrepancy between the critical situations in which this ice-cream truck seemed always to find itself, and the somewhat innocuous tinkle of the bell which accompanied its doings. However, his listener wasn’t captious. She gazed at him with wide-open eyes, and a rapture so complete that all she could think of to say was an oft-repeated “My!”

They took turns dressing, and as they started home he glowed pleasantly under her admiration. Yet admiration, even now, was not quite enough. He craved definite superiority.

“Beat you to the edge of the woods.”

“No you can’t.”

She started so suddenly he was taken by surprise, and as she raced ahead of him he had one twinge of fear that she not only could dive better than he could, but run faster. But the distance was in his favor. She tired, and as he clattered past her he had at last what he had craved all afternoon: the hot, passionate feeling that he was better than she was; that from now on she must be his creature, to worship him without question, to look on from a distance while he dazzled her with tricks. It was short-lived. He felt a jolting, terrible pain in his face, having tripped on the wet bathing suit and slammed down in the road, the dust grinding into his mouth, the little stones cutting his cheek. He set his jaws, closed his eyes, screwed up his face in an agony of effort not to cry.

“It’s all right, Burwell. You’re not hurt bad. You’re just scratched up a little bit. Here, I’ll wipe it off for you.”

He felt the wet bathing suit wiping his face, then the soft dry dabs of her handkerchief. The effort not to cry was becoming more than he could stand. He clenched his fists.

“Open your mouth and close your eyes, I’ll give you something to make you wise.” A quick, warm little kiss alighted on his mouth, stayed a moment, pressed hard, and then left.

A wave of happiness swept over him. The strain eased, he hadn’t cried. He opened his eyes. She was gone.

They were at supper when he got home, and his mother jumped up when she saw him. “Mercy, Burwell, what on earth has happened to you?”

“I fell down.”

“Mercy! Mercy!”

“I’m all right.”

“Are you sure? My, I’ll have to put something on your face before you come to the table.”

“I don’t want any supper.”

She felt his brow.

“I’m going to bed.”

“I don’t think he has any fever.”

“I’m all right, but I’m going to bed.”

However, at this point Liza, the cook, appeared with a platterful of sliced watermelon, then hastily backed out: “Ah thought you-all was th’oo.”

His eye caught the wet redness, and he couldn’t shake it out of his mind. “Well, maybe I could eat a little bit.”

“Then sit right down, and I’ll put something on your face later.”

He sat down, and permitted himself to be coaxed into eating three pieces of fried chicken, two new potatoes, four ears of corn on the cob, a dish of pickled beets, and two big slices of watermelon.

While he was putting this away, his mother kept up a sort of running soliloquy: “I wonder if I ought to let him go to that party tonight. It seems a pity to have him miss it, and yet — we’ll see.”

It annoyed him that his mother seemed to have forgotten he didn’t want to go to the party, and discussed it as though it were something he had been looking forward to for his whole life. However, there was nothing to do but fall in with that view of it, and dodge the main issue, if possible.

“It’s all right. I don’t mind. I’m going to bed.”

“Did you shine your shoes?”

“No’m, I was going to, but — I fell down.”

“Well, I’ll shine them. You keep quiet after supper, and then we’ll see.”

“It’s all right. I don’t want to go.”

“Why, Burwell! You know you want to go.”

“I do not! I’m going to bed!”

He had overplayed it, and he knew it. At his insistent shout his father, who had been eyeing him narrowly for some time, suddenly spoke: “Burwell.”

“Yes, sir.”

“What’s this about the party?”

“Nothing.”

“When you get through supper you’re to shine your shoes. You’re to bathe and dress. When you’re ready, come to me, and we’ll get some collodion on that face so it’ll have a beauty suitable to the festivities. Then you’re going to the party.”

“Yes, sir.”

Bathed, shined, dressed, and patched, he started out, but he was in no hurry to get there. He was troubled, and he fingered the birthday present in his pocket most uneasily. How to explain his absence from his job wasn’t what bothered him. He already had a plan that would take care of it handsomely. He was at an age when it would be sufficient to say, “Yah, were you kidded! Did you bite! Yah!” and this would settle anything. But somehow he didn’t like it. He didn’t know it, but what ailed him was that he had already tasted triumph, or anyhow some sort of triumph, and what he craved now was humility, the sweet sacrifice of love: the sensation of being unselfish, and noble, and wan about the eyes.

He loitered outside the billiard hall watching the mysterious business of white balls clicking against red; scuffled past the picture show, examining all the posters; dillied and dallied, but after a while he had it. He would put the first plan into effect almost as soon as he got there, but he would combine it with another plan, to be uncorked later. After Marjorie had had an hour of moping brokenheartedly trying to be gay with her guests, he would call her aside and tell her the truth, or what at the moment seemed to be the truth. He had worked for Red. He had helped him on the truck; had helped him for two weeks, as a matter of fact; and all because he knew that tonight would be her birthday, and he wanted to give her something out of his own money, and — well, here it is. Then she would know she had cruelly misjudged him, and they would sit there in the shadows, happy, but in a soft dreamy way, since she would be aware at last of his lofty nature.

So it was quite dark when he got there and the party was in full swing out in the backyard. The yard had been strung with lanterns, and as he slipped back of the house he could see them all out there dancing on the clipped grass, to the radio. He paused in the shadows and looked for Marjorie. She wasn’t there. He kept looking and looking, and then a sound caught his ear, so close he jumped. He turned, and found himself looking in the dining-room window. In front of it on a small table, not three feet from him, was the big cake, with Marjorie’s name on it, the unlit candles spaced around its edge, with one in the middle.

And approaching that cake, in the dark room, was Marjorie. She got to it, picked up the knife, hesitated. Then he felt creepy at the enormity of the thing she was about to do. She was cutting the cake that was to be carried out before the guests as the grand surprise of the evening.

He was numb with shocked astonishment as he saw the knife go in twice, saw Marjorie pick up the wedge of cake in her hands and hurry out of the room. He was still staring at the mutilated cake when he heard a step, saw her run out of the front of the house, flit down the lawn to the pillar of the driveway, and wait. Then shame, panic, fear, and love shot through him in one terrible stab. He crept to the edge of the porch. He slipped the present under the rail. He ran blindly to the street, into the night.

From the distance, up the street; came the bell of the icecream truck.

Dead Man

Brush Fire

He banged sparks with his shovel, coughed smoke, cursed the impulse that had led him to heed that rumor down in the railroad yards that CCC money was to be had by all who wanted to fight this fire the papers were full of, up in the hills. Back home he had always heard them called forest fires, but they seemed to be brush fires here in California. So far, all he had got out of it was a suit of denims, a pair of shoes, and a ration of stew, served in an army mess kit. For that he had ridden twenty miles in a jolting truck out from Los Angeles to these parched hills, stood in line an hour to get his stuff, stood in line another hour for the stew, and then labored all night, the flames singeing his hair, the ground burning his feet through the thick brogans, the smoke searing his lungs, until he thought he would go frantic if he didn’t get a whiff of air.

Still the thing went on. Hundreds of them smashed out flames, set backfires, hacked at bramble, while the bitter complaint went around: “Why don’t they give us brush hooks if we got to cut down them bushes? What the hell good are these damn shovels?” The shovel became the symbol of their torture. Here and there, through the night, a grotesque figure would throw one down, jump on it, curse at it, then pick it up again as the hysteria subsided.

“Third shift, this way! Third shift, this way. Bring your shovels and turn over to shift number four. Everybody in the third shift, right over here.”

It was the voice of the CCC foreman, who, all agreed, knew as much about fighting fires as a monkey did. Had it not been for the state fire wardens, assisting at critical spots, they would have made no progress whatever.

“All right. Answer to your names when I call them. You got to be checked off to get your money. They pay today two o’clock, so yell loud when I call your name.”

“Today’s Sunday.”

“I said they pay today, so speak up when I call your name.”

The foreman had a pencil with a little bulb in the end of it which he flashed on and began going down the list.

“Bub Anderson, Lonnie Beal, K. Bernstein, Harry Deever...” As each name was called there was a loud “Yo,” so when his name was called, Paul Larkin, he yelled “Yo” too. Then the foreman was calling a name and becoming annoyed because there was no answer. “Ike Pendleton! Ike Pendleton!”

“He’s around somewhere.”

“Why ain’t he here? Don’t he know he’s got to be checked off?”

“Hey, Ike! Ike Pendleton!”

He came out of his trance with a jolt. He had a sudden recollection of a man who had helped him to clear out a brier patch a little while ago, and whom he hadn’t seen since. He raced up the slope and over toward the fire.

Near the brier patch, in a V between the main fire and a backfire that was advancing to meet it, he saw something. He rushed, but a cloud of smoke doubled him back. He retreated a few feet, sucked in a lungful of air, charged through the backfire. There, on his face, was a man. He seized the collar of the denim jacket, started to drag. Then he saw it would be fatal to take this man through the backfire that way. He tried to lift, but his lungful of air was spent: he had to breathe or die. He expelled it, inhaled, screamed at the pain of the smoke in his throat.

He fell on his face beside the man, got a little air there, near the ground. He shoved his arm under the denim jacket, heaved, felt the man roll solidly on his back. He lurched to his feet, ran through the backfire. Two or three came to his aid, helped him with his load to the hollow, where the foreman was, where the air was fresh and cool.

“Where’s his shovel? He ought to have turned it over to—”

“His shovel! Give him water!”

“I’m gitting him water; but one thing at a time—”

“Water! Water! Where’s that water cart?”

The foreman, realizing belatedly that a life might be more important than the shovel tally, gave orders to “work his arms and legs up and down.” Somebody brought a bucket of water, and little by little Ike Pendleton came back to life. He coughed, breathed with long shuddering gasps, gagged, vomited. They wiped his face, fanned him, splashed water on him.

Soon, in spite of efforts to keep him where he was, he fought to his feet, reeled around with the hard, terrible vitality of some kind of animal. “Where’s my hat? Who took my hat?” They clapped a hat on his head, he sat down suddenly, then got up and stood swaying. The foreman remembered his responsibility. “All right, men, give him a hand, walk him down to his bunk.”

“Check him off!”

“Check the rest of us! You ain’t passed the P’s yet!”

“O.K. Sing out when I call. Gus Ritter!”

“Yo!”

When the names had been checked, Paul took one of Ike’s arms and pulled it over his shoulder; somebody else took the other, and they started for the place, a half mile or so away on the main road, where the camp was located. The rest fell in behind. Dawn was just breaking as the little file, two and two, fell into a shambling step.

“Hep!.. Hep!”

“Hey, cut that out! This ain’t no lockstep.”

“Who says it ain’t?”

When he woke up, in the army tent he shared with five others, he became aware of a tingle of expectancy in the air. Two of his tent mates were shaving; another came in, a towel over his arm, his hair wet and combed.

“Where did you get that wash?”

“They got a shower tent over there.”

He got out his safety razor, slipped his feet in the shoes, shaved over one of the other men’s shoulders, then started out in his underwear. “Hey!” At the warning, he looked out. Several cars were out there, some of them with women standing around them, talking to figures in blue denim.

“Sunday, bo. Visiting day. This is when the women all comes to say hello to their loved ones. You better put something on.”

He slipped on the denims, went over to the shower tent, drew towel and soap, stripped, waited his turn. It was a real shower, the first he had had in a long time. It was cold, but it felt good. There was a comb there. He washed it, combed his hair, put on his clothes, went back to his tent, put the towel away, made his bunk. Then he fell in line for breakfast — or dinner, as it happened, as it was away past noon. It consisted of corned beef, cabbage, a boiled potato, apricot pie, and coffee.

He wolfed down the food, washed up his kit, began to feel pretty good. He fell into line again, and presently was paid, $4.50 for nine hours’ work, at fifty cents an hour. He fingered the bills curiously. They were the first he had had in his hand since that day, two years before, when he had run away from home and begun this dreadful career of riding freights, bumming meals, and sleeping in flophouses.

He realized with a start they were the first bills he had ever earned in his twenty-two years; for the chance to earn bills had long since departed when he graduated from high school and began looking for jobs, never finding any. He shoved them in his pocket, wondered whether he would get the chance that night to earn more of them.

The foreman was standing there, in the space around which the tents were set up, with a little group around him. “It’s under control, but we got to watch it, and there’ll be another call tonight. Any you guys that want to work, report to me eight o’clock tonight, right here in this spot.”

By now the place was alive with people, dust, and excitement. Cars were jammed into every possible place, mostly second-, third-, and ninth-hand, but surrounded by neatly dressed women, children, and old people, come to visit the fire fighters in denim. In a row out front, ice-cream, popcorn, and cold-drink trucks were parked, and the road was gay for half a mile in both directions with pennants stuck on poles, announcing their wares. Newspaper reporters were around too, with photographers, and as soon as the foreman had finished his harangue, they began to ask him questions about the fire, the number of men engaged in fighting it, and the casualties.

“Nobody hurt. Nobody hurt at all. Oh, early this morning, fellow kind of got knocked out by smoke, guy went in and pulled him out, nothing at all.”

“What was his name?”

“I forget his name. Here — here’s the guy that pulled him out. Maybe he knows his name.”

In a second he was surrounded, questions being shouted at him from all sides. He gave them Ike’s name and his own, and they began a frantic search for Ike, but couldn’t find him. Then they decided he was the main story, not Ike, and directed him to pose for his picture. “Hey, not there; not by the ice-cream truck. We don’t give ice cream a free ad in this paper. Over there by the tent.”

He stood as directed, and two or three in the third shift told the story all over again in vivid detail. The reporters took notes, the photographers snapped several pictures of him, and a crowd collected. “And will you put it in that I’m from Spokane, Washington? I’d kind of like to have that in, on account of my people back there. Spokane, Washington.”

“Sure, we’ll put that in.”

The reporters left as quickly as they had come, and the crowd began to melt. He turned away, a little sorry that his big moment had passed so quickly. Behind him he half heard a voice: “Well, ain’t that something to be getting his picture in the paper?” He turned, saw several grins, but nobody was looking at him. Standing with her back to him, dressed in a blue silk Sunday dress, and kicking a pebble, was a girl. It was a girl who had spoken, and by quick elimination he decided it must be she.

The sense of carefree goodness that had been growing on him since he got his money, since the crowd began to jostle him, since he had become a hero, focused somewhere in his head with dizzy suddenness. “Any objections?”

This got a laugh. She kept her eyes on the pebble but turned red and said: “No.”

“You sure?”

“Just so you don’t get stuck up.”

“Then that’s O.K. How about an ice-cream cone?”

“I don’t mind.”

“Hey, mister, two ice-cream cones.”

“Chocolate.”

“Both of them chocolate and both of them double.”

When they got their cones he led her away from the guffawing gallery which was beginning to be a bit irksome. She looked at him then, and he saw she was pretty. She was small, with blue eyes, dusty blonde hair that blended with the dusty scene around her, and a spray of freckles over her forehead. He judged her to be about his own age. After looking at him, and laughing rather self-consciously and turning red, she concentrated on the cone, which she licked with a precise technique. He suddenly found he had nothing to say, but said it anyhow: “Well, say — what are you doing here?”

“Oh — had to see the fire, you know.”

“Have you seen it?”

“Haven’t even found out where it is, yet.”

“Well, my, my! I see I got to show it to you.”

“You know where it is?”

“Sure. Come on.”

He didn’t lead the way to the fire, though. He took her up the arroyo, through the burned-over area, where the fire had been yesterday. After a mile or so of walking, they came to a little grove of trees beside a spring. The trees were live oak and quite green and cast a deep shade on the ground. Nobody was in sight, or even in earshot. It was a place the Sunday trippers didn’t know about.

“Oh, my! Look at these trees! They didn’t get burnt.”

“Sometimes it jumps — the fire, I mean. Jumps from one hill straight over to the other hill, leaves places it never touched at all.”

“My, but it’s pretty.”

“Let’s sit down.”

“If I don’t get my dress dirty.”

“I’ll put this jacket down for you to sit on.”

“Yes, that’s all right.”

They sat down. He put his arm around her, put his mouth against her lips.

It was late afternoon before she decided that her family might be looking for her and that she had better go back. She had an uncle in the camp, it seemed, and they had come as much to see him as to see the fire. She snickered when she remembered she hadn’t seen either. They both snickered. They walked slowly back, their little fingers hooked together. He asked if she would like to go with him to one of the places along the road to get something to eat, but she said they had brought lunch with them, and would probably stop along the beach to eat it, going back.

They parted, she to slip into the crowd unobtrusively; he to get his mess kit, for the supper line was already formed. As he watched the blue dress flit between the tents and disappear, a gulp came into his throat; it seemed to him that this girl he had held in his arms, whose name he hadn’t even thought to inquire, was almost the sweetest human being he had ever met in his life.

When he had eaten, and washed his mess kit and put it away, he wanted a cigarette. He walked down the road to a Bar-B-Q shack, bought a package, lit up, started back. Across a field, a hundred yards away, was the ocean. He inhaled the cigarette, inhaled the ocean air, enjoyed the languor that was stealing over him, wished he didn’t have to go to work. And then, as he approached the camp, he felt something ominous.

Ike Pendleton was there, and in front of him this girl, this same girl he had spent the afternoon with. Ike said something to her, and she backed off. Ike followed, his fists doubled up. The crowd was silent, seemed almost to be holding its breath. Ike cursed at her. She began to cry. One of the state police came running up to them, pushed them apart, began to lecture them. The crowd broke into a buzz of talk. A woman, who seemed to be a relative, began to explain to all and sundry: “What if she did go with some guy to look at the fire? He don’t live with her no morel He don’t support her — never did support her! She didn’t come up here to see him; never even knew he was up here! My land, can’t the poor child have a good time once in a while?”

It dawned on him that this girl was Ike’s wife.

He sat down on a truck bumper, sucked nervously at his cigarette. Some of the people who had guffawed at the ice-cream-cone episode in the afternoon looked at him, whispered. The policeman called over the woman who had been explaining things, and she and the girl, together with two children, went hurriedly over to a car and climbed into it. The policeman said a few words to Ike, and then went back to his duties on the road.

Ike walked over, picked up a mess kit, squatted on the ground between tents, and resumed a meal apparently interrupted. He ate sullenly, with his head hulked down between his shoulders. It was almost dark. The lights came on. The camp was not only connected to county water but to county light as well. Two boys went over to Ike, hesitated, then pointed to Paul. “Hey, mister, that’s him. Over there, sitting on the truck.”

Ike didn’t look up. When the boys came closer and repeated their news, he jumped up suddenly and chased them. One of them he hit with a baked potato. When they had run away he went back to his food. He paid no attention to Paul.

In the car, the woman was working feverishly at the starter. It would whine, the engine would start and bark furiously for a moment or two, then die with a series of explosions. Each time it did this, the woman would let in the clutch, the car would rock on its wheels, and then come to rest. This went on for at least five minutes, until Paul thought he would go insane if it didn’t stop, and people began to yell: “Get a horse!” “Get that damn oil can out of here and stop that noise!” “Have a heart! This ain’t the Fourth of July!”

For the twentieth time it was repeated. Then Ike jumped up and ran over there. People closed in after him. Paul, propelled by some force that seemed completely apart from himself, ran after him. When he had fought his way through the crowd, Ike was on the running board of the car, the children screaming, men trying to pull him back. He had the knife from the mess kit in his hand. “I’m going to kill her! I’m going to kill her! If it’s the last thing I do on earth, I’m going to kill her!”

“Oh, yeah!”

He seized Ike by the back of the neck, jerked, and slammed him against the fender. Then something smashed against his face. It was the woman, beating him with her handbag. “Go away! Git away from here!”

Ike faced him, lips writhing, eyes glaring a slaty gray against the deep red of the burns he had received that morning. But his voice was low, even if it broke with the intensity of his emotion. “Get out of my way, you! You got nothing to do with this.”

He lunged at Ike with his fist — missed. Ike struck with the knife. He fended with his left arm, felt the steel cut in. With his other hand he struck, and Ike staggered back. There was a pile of shovels beside him, almost tripping him up. He grabbed one, swung, smashed it down on Ike’s head. Ike went down. He stood there, waiting for Ike to get up, with that terrible vitality he had shown this morning. Ike didn’t move. In the car the girl was sobbing.

The police, the ambulance, the dust, the lights, the doctor working on his arm, all swam before his eyes in a blur. Somewhere far off, an excited voice was yelling: “But I got to use your telephone, I got to, I tell you! Guy saves a man’s life this morning, kills him tonight! It’s a hell of a story!” He tried to comprehend the point of this; couldn’t.

The foreman appeared, summoned the third shift to him in loud tones, began to read names. He heard his own name called, but didn’t answer. He was being pushed into the ambulance, handcuffed to one of the policemen.

Coal Black

From up the entry came a whir, the blackness was shot with blue sparks, a cluster of lights appeared and approached. Lonnie opened the trap and the motor passed through. He closed the trap, sat down, and wished he was a motorman. Then he debated whether to eat one of his remaining sandwiches, but decided to wait awhile. Then he whistled “In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree.” It was one of the three tunes he knew, so he whistled it again. Then he just sat there, and found this pleasant. Of course, you might not have found it pleasant to be alone in a tunnel so dark its coal walls sparkled by comparison, with only a carbide lamp to see by and nothing whatever to keep you company. But he minded neither the dark nor the solitude: he was so used to both that he hardly noticed them.

As for the tunnel, it had its points. It was always the same even temperature, winter or summer; the air was fresh, the intricate system of blowers and traps taking care of that. He had helped dig it, shore it, and wire it, so that it seemed a part of him — as the whole mine did for that matter. For this was the only world he had known in all his nineteen years; and he was just as at home in it as you are in your world, and found it just as familiar, just as real, just as satisfying to the soul.

After a while he heard something on the other side of the trap. Instinctively he looked at the rails. If a rat scuttled by, that meant run for his life; for a rat knows, before anybody else knows, when something is about to crack, and it is time to move, and move fast. But no rat appeared, and in a moment he got up, opened the door in the center of the trap, and peered through. At first he saw nothing. He unhooked the lamp from his hat and shot the light around. Huddled against a toolbox, her face smeared with coal dust, her dress torn so that in places her skin showed through, was a girl he judged about sixteen. She stared at him, then began to whimper:

“I’ll go away, honest I will, if you just show me the way out. I don’t mean nothing. I just come in to peep.”

“Who let you in here?”

“Nobody. I hid in a car.”

“Where? You mean you hid in it outside?”

“I don’t know. Yes, of course it was outside. I hid in it, and then the train ran a whole lot further than I thought it was going to. And then I slid out. And then my matches give out, and it was dark and I got lost. And then I kept falling down, and — oh my, look at my dress! Please show me how to get out. I want to go home.”

“Where you live?”

“In the north end of town.”

“I never seen you before.”

“We just moved in. My father, he enlarges pictures. We move from one town to the other. I wanted to see a mine. Please show me how to get out.”

“Set down.”

She sat down dejectedly beside the trap, and he pondered. You see, it’s bad luck for a woman to enter a mine, and whenever this happens, the mine has to be “blown out,” as it is blown out when somebody gets killed; that is, all hands have to quit work for the day, lest some dreadful catastrophe ensue. The trouble was that this was the first day’s work the mine had had in two weeks, and the last it would have for an indefinite period; indeed, all they were doing now was loading empties for the tipple, so the men could have a little work and stray orders could be filled. If he reported this, and they blew the mine out, it might go hard with this girl; for desperate housewives, counting on a full day’s pay to replenish empty shelves, might not be amused if they found they had been cheated by a ninny who merely wanted to peep.

On the next creek a woman who had dashed into a drift to say something to her husband had been so badly beaten she had to be taken to a hospital.

“You know what it means? A woman in a mine?”

“Yes; but I didn’t mean nobody to see me.”

“Ain’t no way you can get out. I can’t leave this here trap, and that place you come in, it’s at least two mile away, and you can’t find it, and anyway you got no light. Ain’t no way you can get out, except we wait till quitting time, and then I take you out by the old drift mouth.”

“All right.”

“You got to stay hid. You heard what I said? They find you in here, something’s going to happen to you. And they find out I let you stay, something’s going to happen to me, too. After they turn me loose, I can’t work in this mine no more, and maybe I can’t work in no mine.”

“Somebody’s coming.”

“In the toolbox — quick!”

She climbed in the toolbox, and he closed the cover, wedging a stone under it so she could have a little air. He sat down and with elaborate nonchalance resumed his rendition of “In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree.” Han Biloxi was approaching. Of course, all that was visible was a bobbing point of light; but to Lonnie a bobbing point of light had special and personal motions, so that he knew it was Han Biloxi without knowing how he knew it or even wondering how he knew it. When Han was within hailing distance he stopped whistling and yelled, “Yah, Han!” There was no answer. Han came on, and when his face could be seen, it was grave. “All right, kid. We’re blowing out. Jake’s train is on the main tunnel, third entry down. He’ll hold for ten minutes.”

“Blowing out? What for?”

“Eckhart got it.”

“What?”

“Rolled ag’in’ the rib.”

“...When?”

“Just now. I seen it myself. Car jumped the switch and got him. He didn’t have a chance.”

“Gee, I rode in with him.”

“You got ten minutes.”

Han stepped through the trap, went on to notify miners farther up the entry.

Lonnie lifted the toolbox cover. “You heard him?”

“Yes.”

“All right. Now you see what you done!”

“Please don’t say that.”

“He’s dead, ain’t he?”

“You don’t have to put it on me.”

“I’m putting it where it belongs.”

She stood up, climbed out of the box, and faced him. “It’s not true. Just because I’m in here, it don’t mean that’s why he got killed. I won’t believe it!”

“Whose fault is it?”

“All right: What are you going to do now?”

“I got to go out on Jake’s train.”

“And leave me in here all alone?”

“I got to go on Jake’s train. If I don’t show up, they start looking for me. If they don’t find me, they think something happened to me.”

“And no light. And pitch dark.”

“Nobody asked you in here.”

“My, but you’re hateful.”

She turned her back to him, and the nape of her neck looked disturbingly childish. He felt a twinge of guilt. She walked around, shaking her head angrily, and then dashed for the toolbox. She didn’t have time to climb into it. She crouched behind it as six or eight miners, following Han Biloxi, stepped through the trap in gloomy silence.

Lonnie called to Han: “Tell Jake not to wait for me. I’m going out by the old drift mouth.”

“What’s the matter — you crazy?”

“There’s a roll of wire up there I want. I’m making myself some rabbit traps. Maybe catch something while we’re laid off.”

“Come on, boy — stop acting like you got no sense. Whoever hear’n tell of that, going through all them old dead entries just to get a roll of wire? Can’t you go up there tomorrow, from the outside?”

“I want the wire tonight.”

“Cut the jawing and let’s go.”

“That’s right; if the kid’s crazy, let him do what he wants — and come on, let’s get out of here.”

They went on, their footsteps growing fainter, the splotches of light contracting until they were a small cluster of luminous blurs, when abruptly they disappeared.

She stood up. “My, but it’s lonely in here!”

“Come on.”

He picked up his lunch bucket and they started down the entry. He led the way on the footpath beside the track, she stumbling along behind. When they had gone a short distance he glanced back, and was just in time to see her reel and wave crazily with her arms to keep her balance. Like a cat striking at prey, he batted her arm down, and she fell, snarling. “What you hit me for? I’m doing as good as I can. That lamp, it don’t give me no light. You can see, but I can’t.”

“Watch that wire.”

“What wire?”

“The feed wire — can’t you see it? Up there on the side, at the top of the rib. That’s why I knocked your arm down. You touch that thing, it’ll kill you so quick you won’t even know what hit you.”

“Oh.”

“We better walk on the track, if that’s how careless you are. If you can’t see behind, walk up beside me. And anyway, why didn’t you say so?”

Side by side they walked between the rails, stepping from one slippery metal tie to the next. He put his arm around her to steady her, and unexpectedly found himself touching her bare flesh. Hastily he shifted his grip, taking her arm. He began trying not to think how soft her skin was, and how warm.

Soon he turned into another entry, and abruptly the top dipped. The height of a mine tunnel depends on the thickness of the coal from which it is dug. The seven-foot seam they had been in now thinned to less than five feet, so that it was impossible for them to stand. He went along at a sidewise shamble, his back bent to clear the top; for low entries were an everyday affair to him and he slipped through them without effort. But she kept bumping her head, and presently broke into hysterics. “I can’t stand it no more! I got to stand up! It’s pressing down on me! And my back hurts!”

“Ain’t much more of the low top. Set down a few minutes, then you won’t feel that way.”

They sat down, she panting and convulsively straightening her aching back. He didn’t look at her. But he was thoroughly aware of her now — of every detail of her slim shape, of those places where her dress was torn, of the heady, sweetly sensuous scent that hung about her. Presently they went on. The top lifted, and he turned again. She gasped at what she saw.

A dead entry is indeed a terrifying spectacle, and could serve as a chamber in some horrible inferno. Untended by man, the top erodes from the air and forms great blisters, like the blisters on paint, except that each blister is five or six feet across and five or six inches thick. The blisters then crack and fall, piece by piece, to the floor, which is thus covered with jagged shards of stone that look like gigantic shark teeth. Add that one touch can bring a blister crashing down; that the fragments underfoot can cut through the thickest shoe; that wiring, timber, rails, and all other signs of human activity have long since been removed; and that in fact nothing human ever comes here — and you can form some idea of what the abandoned parts of a coal mine are like. They proceeded slowly, hugging the wall, he ahead, she at his heels, holding tight to his denim jacket. Then they turned into another, worse than this, and then into still another. They had gone only a short distance in this when there was a report like a cannon shot and the lamp went out. She screamed.

“It’s all right. Some top fell down, that’s all. Stick close to the rib, like I do. It generally falls in the middle.”

“Is the lamp busted? Why did it go out?”

“Air. Concussion blew it out.”

“Please light it. The dark scares me so.”

“Sure.”

He had, in fact, already unhooked the lamp from his hat and was banging the flint with the palm of his hand. Sparks appeared, but no light. She moaned: “I knew it was busted.”

“It ain’t busted. Carbide needs water, that’s all.”

He opened his lunch bucket, to pour in water. Then he remembered he had drunk all his water. He waited, hoping a few drops might still be left. Nothing happened.

He closed the bucket, set it down, puckered his lips, preparatory to priming the lamp with spit. Then his mouth went dry with fright and he couldn’t spit. For what he had touched, when he set down the bucket, was a hand, cold and unmoving. She felt his breath stop. “What’s the matter?”

“We took the wrong turn.”

“Are we lost?”

“No, we ain’t lost. But we’re in the haunted entry.”

“The—”

He placed her hand over the cold thing he had touched. She screamed, and screamed again. “That’s the stone — the stone they put up for him because they couldn’t get him out. With the hand chiseled on it, holding a palm. And he’s in there, and he keeps tamping his powder.”

“I don’t hear nothing,” she whispered.

“You will... He tamped in his powder, and lit his fuse, and started out here to wait for the shot. Then the whole room caved in. And he keeps going back there to see why it don’t go off, and then he tamps in his powder again, and—”

“I still don’t hear—”

But her words froze in her throat, for off in the rock somewhere began a faint clink, clink, clink. Then it stopped. “That’s it — that’s the needle. Now comes the tamping iron.” The sound resumed, reached a brisk crescendo, and stopped again. “Now he’s coming out! Now he’s coming this way! And we can’t move; we got no light!”

They were crouched on the floor now, locked in each other’s arms, in an ecstasy of terror. Several times the sound was repeated, and they strained closer as they listened and waited. But fear is a peculiar emotion: it cannot be sustained indefinitely at the same high pitch. In spite of his horror of the ghost, he gradually became aware that there was something distinctly pleasurable about this: lying in the dark with this girl in his arms, shuddering in unison with her, mingling his breath with hers; indeed, with an almost exquisite agony he began to look forward to each repetition of the sound. He thought of her flesh again, and in a moment his hand was touching her side, patting the torn place in her dress, as though this were what the circumstances called for. She didn’t seem to mind. On the contrary, his thick paw apparently soothed her; so that she relaxed slightly, and put her head on his shoulder, and sighed. He patted and patted again, and each time the sound would resume they would draw together.

Suddenly, though, she sat up, listened, and turned to him. “That ain’t no miner.”

“Oh, yes, it is. He—”

“That ain’t no miner. That’s water. I can tell by how it sounds.”

“Gee, if we could only get some! But I can’t even start the lamp. I’m scared so bad I can’t spit.”

“Give me that lamp. I can spit.”

She took the lamp, and he heard it hiss from plenty of good wet spit. He struck the flint, and flame punctured the darkness. “We got to hurry. That won’t last long.”

“Keep still, so I can hear.”

He held the light, and she crawled on her hands and knees, cocking her head now and then to listen. The flame grew smaller and smaller. Suddenly she thrust her hand under a slab of rock. “There it is.”

“You sure?”

“Give me the bucket.”

She took the bucket and thrust it under, and at once came the loud clank of water on tin. They looked at each other, and he spoke breathlessly: “That’s it! That’s how it sounded, only now it’s in the bucket.” The lamp went out, and they waited in the dark while there came a few drops, then a pause, then a few more drops, then the rapid staccato of a full trickle, then a long pause, then the separate drops again. After a long time she shook the bucket, and they heard the water slosh. “That’s enough. That’ll get us out.”

They poured water in the lamp, struck the flint, and a fine big flame spurted out. They were off at once. They went through more dead entries, then came to where the going was better. He laughed — a high nervous giggle. “Ain’t that a joke? Won’t them miners feel silly when I tell them that haunt ain’t nothing but water?”

“It come to me, just like that, that them was drops.”

“And think of that — that was why they stopped working that coal. That’s why the company had to close down them entries. Not no miner would work in there.”

“Gee, that’s funny.”

When, still laughing at this, they popped suddenly on to the old drift mouth, it was nearly dark outside, and snowing. They said stiff good-byes; she thanked him for helping her out, and promised to protect him in his guilty secret. She started down the mountain toward the part of the camp where she lived. He watched her a moment, and then something rose in his throat, an overwhelming recollection — of a naked patch of flesh, lovely smell, and brave, hissing spit.

He called in a queer strained voice: “Yay!”

“What?”

“Come back here a minute.”

She ran back and stood in front of him. He wanted to say something; didn’t know what it was; then heard himself talking, in the same queer voice, about his hope there was no hard feelings about what he had said, back there in the mine, before they started out. She didn’t answer. She kept looking at him. And then, to his astonishment, she came up and put her arms around him. Then he said it. He pulled her to him, pushed his lips against hers for the first time, and the words came jerkily: “Listen... The hell with going home... Let’s not go home... Let’s get married... Let’s... be together.”

She stayed near him, touched his face with her fingers, then looked away. “We can’t get married.”

“Why not?”

“We got no money. You got no money. I got no money, nobody in a coal camp has got any money... Gee, I’d love to be with you.”

“My old man would take us in.”

“And your old lady would throw us out.”

“All right, never mind the married part. Let’s not go home tonight. Let’s stay up here, in one of these shacks.”

“They’ll be looking for us.”

“Let them look.”

“We’d be awful cold and hungry.”

“We can build a fire, and I got two sandwiches left.”

“...All right.”

They tried to say something else, but found themselves unexpectedly embarrassed. But then he began shaking her, his eyes shining. “Who says we can’t get married? Who says we got no money? Why, I’ll have a job! I’ll have a real job! I’ll have a company job!”

“How will you get a company job?”

“The haunt! Don’t you get it? I’ll prove to them miners that haunt is nothing but water! Then they can get that coal! Boy, will they give me a company job for doing that! Will they!”

“Gee. I bet they will.”

“Listen. Do you really mean it? About camping out tonight?”

“I don’t want we should be separated, ever.”

“Kiss me again. Maybe we can catch a rabbit. Can you cook a rabbit?”

“Yes.”

Inside, an astral miner picked up an astral bucket and sadly prepared to join the great army of unemployed.

The Girl in the Storm

He woke up suddenly, feeling that ice had touched him, but it was an interval before his mind caught up with what he saw. Through the open door of the boxcar it was pouring rain: that much was as he remembered it from the night before. But on the floor was a spreading puddle. It was the puddle, indeed, which had touched his ribs and awakened him; he was edging away from it, even while he was blinking his eyes. When he scrambled to his feet and looked out, the breath left his body in a wailing moan. For as far as he could see no land was visible, nothing but brown, swirling water full of trees, bushes, and what might have been houses, moving in the direction of the bridge, off to his right. It was already lapping at the door of the boxcar; it was what was causing the rapidly deepening puddle.

He stood staring out at it, and became fascinated by a pile of ties across from the car. One by one the flood lifted them, as though some invisible elephant were riding it, and carried them spinning into the current, to bang against the boxcar at his feet, then go swiftly on to the bridge. He watched several go by, then turned his back to them and caught the roof of the car with his hands. He chinned himself, in an effort to climb to the roof, but there was no support for his feet, and he dropped back.

When the next tie came by, he stooped down and caught it. Hugging it to his stomach, he dragged it into the car. Then he jammed it across the door slantwise, one end at the bottom, the other halfway up. He caught the roof of the car again and, clambering up the slanting tie, pushed up high enough to get his chin over the edge. Then he managed to reach the catwalk on the roof of the car, and pulled himself toward it. Wriggling on his belly, he was safely on the walk in a few moments, and stood up.

All around him was the flood, and behind him he could hear it thunder under the bridge. About a quarter of a mile ahead of him was a loading platform, and beyond that the station. No locomotive was in sight; he had been shunted with a string of empties onto a siding and left there. Beyond the station, on higher ground, was what appeared to be a village, and he could see trucks backed up there, evidently evacuating whole families. He wondered if he could get a place on a truck. But it took him ten minutes, clambering down from boxcars to flatcars, and then over boxcars again, to reach the loading platform, and when he ran around it to yell at them, they were gone.

He stood looking at the station, read the name of the place: Hildalgo, California. For the moment he was sheltered from the rain; but his respite was short. The loading platform was only a few inches higher than the floor of the cars, and even while he was standing there another puddle appeared and he was retreating from it. He found himself facing the county road. It was higher than the platform, and although water was running over it in a sheet, and back toward the bridge it dipped into the flood, between this point and the village it was not inundated. To reach it he would have to go through water at least waist-deep, and he eyed it dismally. Then he squatted down, held his breath, and plunged in.

When he scrambled up on the concrete he was so wet he could feel the weight of his denim pants hanging off his hips. He started up the road at a half trot, the storm driving him from behind. He didn’t know where he was going, except that he had to find shelter. And who would shelter him he had no idea, for he knew from bitter experience that nineteen-year-old hoboes are seldom welcome guests, whether rain-soaked or not.

He passed a stalled car, with nobody in it. He passed several houses, in front of which he had seen the trucks. They were obviously empty, but they were below road level and surrounded by yellow ponds pocked with rain. He came to a sidewalk, but between him and the curbs was a torrent, and he stayed in the center of the road. He came to a filling station, but it was deserted and six inches deep in water. Next to the filling station was a store, a chain grocery store. He headed for it, going in up to his knees in the torrent. The force of it almost upset him and forced him several paces below his goal. When he gained the sidewalk he ran at the door, wrenching at the knob and driving against it with one motion.

It was locked. As his face smashed against the glass, he remembered it was Sunday.

He stood there, furiously rattling the door. Facing him, inside, he could see the clock: ten minutes to three. But nothing answered his rattling except the rain. He kicked the door, dashed away, and in a second was under cover. Next to the store was a half-finished house, and his dive for the porch was automatic. He turned in anger at the rain, stood stamping the water off his legs, then went inside. The floor was laid, but the walls were only half finished and there was a damp smell of plaster. Off to one side were piled lumber, tar paper, and sawbucks. But the doors and windows were not in place yet, and the air felt even colder than the air outside.

He stood shivering in his soaking denims; started to take off the coat. As the air met his wet chest, he pulled it around him again. At the touch of the clammy cloth he gritted his teeth and took it off. He took off his shoes and his pants. He wore no socks or undershirt. He was left in a pair of tattered shorts, and while he was draping the denims over a sawbuck he collapsed on the tar paper, shaking with chill. But soon he was quiet, and he could think of but one thing: that he had to get warm. He thought of fire, and looked around.

On one side of the room was a fireplace, the mortar in it still damp. The tar paper would do to start it, all right, and there were bricks outside he could use to build it on. The lumber would burn, if there were any pieces short enough to go in the fireplace. He spied a kit of carpenter’s tools in one corner, went over to examine it, wincing as the crumbs of plaster hurt his feet.

The main tool in the kit was a saw. Quickly he set up two sawbucks, laid a joist between them and cut it up with the saw. The exercise made him feel better. When he had a pile of wood, he got two bricks and began to build the fire. He tore up tar paper and laid it on the bricks, found the carpenter’s trimming knife and whittled kindling, laid the big pieces he had sawed on top. But when he went to his coat and fished the matches out of the pocket, the tips were nothing but smelly wet smears.

He cursed, screamed, and pounded his fist against the wall. He went all through the house, searching every place he could think of, trying to find a match. He began to shake from chill again, and ran to the front door to shake his fist at the rain.

Down the road, creeping slowly, came a car, its lights on. It was a small sedan, and it went cautiously past him. Bitterly he wondered where the driver thought he was going, for the lake of floodwaters down by the station would make further progress impossible. About this time the driver seemed to see the flood too, for a little beyond the grocery store the car came to a stop. Then, as though it were part of a slow movie, it began to slide. It slid into the torrent, lurched against the curb, stopped. Almost at once the taillight went out. That, he decided, was because the water had shorted the ignition. This car, like the other one, was there to stay awhile.

He watched, wondered if the guy would have a match. Then the door opened, the left-hand door, next to the road, and a foot appeared, then a leg. It wasn’t a man’s leg; it was a woman’s. A girl got out, and staggered as the storm hit her. She was a smallish girl, in a raincoat. She slammed the door shut and started toward him, around the back of the car, heading for the curb. He opened his mouth to yell at her, but he was too late. The water staggered her and she went down. She tried to get up; the current tumbled her under the wheels of the car.

He leaped from the porch, went scampering to her in his shorts. Taking her by the hand, he jerked her to her feet, put his arms around her, ran her to the house. As he pulled her into the cold interior, her teeth chattered. He grabbed her dripping handbag, clawed it open. “You got a match? We’ll freeze if we don’t get a match!”

“There’s some in the car.”

He dashed out again, ran down to the car, jerked the door open, jumped inside. In the dashboard compartment he found a package of paper matches, wiped his hand dry on the seat before he touched them. He looked around for something to wrap them in, to keep the rain off them. On the back seat he saw robes. He grabbed them, wrapped them around the matches.

When he got back to the house he waited only to open the robes and dry his hands again, pawing with them on the wool, Then he struck a match, and it lit. He touched the tar paper with it. A blue flame appeared, hesitated, spread out, and licked the wood. The fire crackled. It turned yellow and light filled the room. He felt warmth. He crowded so close he was almost in the fireplace.

“Come on, kid, you better get warm.”

“I’m already here.”

She picked up one of the robes, held it in front of the fire to warm it, put it around him. Then she warmed the other one, pulled it around herself, squatted down beside him. He sat down on the robe, tucked it around his feet. The fire burned up, scorched his face. He didn’t move. The heat reached him through the robe. His shivering stopped, he relaxed with a long, quavering sigh. She looked at him.

“My, you must have been cold.”

“You don’t know the half of it.”

“I almost died, myself. If you hadn’t come, I don’t know what I would have done. I went clear down, in that water.”

“I yelled at you, but you was already in it.”

“I don’t know what’s going to happen to the car,”

“It’ll be all right soon as it dries out.”

“You think so?”

“Just got water in it, that’s all.”

“I hope that’s all.”

“Some rain!”

“It’s awful, and it’s going to get worse. I had the radio on in the car. They’re warning people. Over in Hildalgo they took everybody out. Half the town’s washed away.”

“Yeah, I seen them.”

“You were in Hildalgo?”

“Yeah...What you talking about? This is Hildalgo.”

“This is Hildalgo?”

“That’s what it says on the sign at the station.”

“Oh, my! I thought Hildalgo was on the other road.”

“Well? So it’s Hildalgo.”

“But there’s nobody here. They took them all away.”

“O.K. Then it’s us.”

“Suppose this washes away?”

“Till it does, we got a fire.”

She got up, holding the robe tightly around her, and pulled a sawbuck over to the fire. On it, he noticed for the first time, were her sweater, stockings, and skirt. She must have taken them off while he was down in the car. She looked around.

“Are those your things over there? Don’t you want me to move them closer to the fire, so they’ll dry?”

“I’ll do it.”

The sight of her absurdly small things had made him suddenly aware of her as a person, and he was afraid to let her move his denims to the fire for fear that in the heat they would stink. He got up, pulled the pile of tar paper to the fire for her to sit on. Then he took the denims off the sawbuck and went back with them to the kitchen. The fixtures were in, though caked with grit, and on his previous tour of the place he had seen a bucket and some soap. He dumped the denims on the floor, filled the bucket with water, carried it to where she was. By poking with a piece of flooring he made a place for it on the fire, and while it was heating, studied her.

She wasn’t a pretty girl exactly. She was small, with sandy hair, and freckles on her nose. But she had a friendly smile, and she wasn’t bawling at her plight. Indeed, she seemed to take it more philosophically than he did. He took her to be about his own age.

“What’s your name?”

“Flora. Flora Hilton... It’s really Dora, but they all began calling me Dumb Dora, so I changed it.”

“Yes, I guess that was bad.”

“What’s yours?”

“Jack. Jack Schwab.”

“You come from California?”

“Pennsylvania. I — kind of travel around.”

“Hitchhike?”

“Sometimes. Other times I ride the freights.”

“I didn’t think you talked like California.”

“What you doing out in this storm?”

“I went over to my uncle’s. I went over there last night, to stay till Monday. But when it started to rain I thought I better get back. It wasn’t so bad over where he lives, and I didn’t know it was going to be like this. They’ve got no radio or anything. But then, when I turned the car radio on, I found out. I still thought I could make it, though. I thought I was on the main road. I didn’t know I was coming through Hildalgo.”

“Well, they’ll be coming for you. The cops, or somebody. We’ll see them when they find the car.”

“I don’t know if they’ll be coming for me.”

“Oh, they will.”

“My father, he don’t even know I started out, and my uncle, he probably thinks I’m home by now.”

“Then we got it to ourselves.”

“Sure looks like it.”

The water was steaming by now. He wrapped the hot bucket handle in tar paper, lifted it off the fire, and went back to the kitchen with it. First washing out the sink, then using a piece of tar paper as a stopper, he soaped the denims and washed them. The water turned so black he felt a sense of shame. He put them through two or three waters, wrung them dry. The last of the hot water he saved for the shorts he had on. With a quick glance toward the front of the house, he stepped out of them, washed them, wrung them out. Then he spread them, to step back into them. They were no wetter than when he took them off, but he hated the idea of having them touch him. However, they were hot from the water, and felt unexpectedly pleasant when he buttoned them up.

Back at the fire, he draped the denims on the sawbuck, beside her things, to dry.

“Well, Flora, nice climate you got.”

“Sunny California! It can rain harder here than any place on earth. Well, you know what they say. We only have two kinds of weather in California, magnificent and unusual.”

“I’ll say it’s unusual.”

“Just listen to that rain come down.”

“What do you do with yourself, Flora?”

“Me? Oh, I work. I got a job in a drive-in.”

“Slinging hot dogs, hey?”

“I wish you’d talk about something else.”

“A hot dog sure would go good now, wouldn’t it?”

“I was the one that played dumb this morning. They wanted me to wait for breakfast, but I was in such a hurry to get away I wouldn’t listen to them. I haven’t had anything to eat all day.”

“Breakfast? Say, that’s a laugh.”

“Haven’t you had anything to eat either?”

“I haven’t et a breakfast in so long I’ve forgot what it tastes like. By the time they get around to me it’s always dinnertime, and even then, when they get to me, sometimes they close the window in my face.”

“I guess it’s hard, hitchhiking and—”

“Flora! Are we the couple of dopes!”

“What’s the matter, Jack?”

“Talking about hot dogs and breakfast. That store! There’s enough grub in there to feed an army!”

“You mean — just take it?”

“You think it’s going to walk over here and ask us to eat it? Come on! Here’s where we eat!”

When he seized the largest of the carpenter’s chisels and the hammer, she still sat there, watching him, and didn’t follow when he went outside. He splashed around to the rear of the store, drove the chisel into the crack of the door, pulled. Something snapped, and he pushed the door open. He waited a moment, the rain pouring on him from the roof, for the sound of the burglar alarm, but he heard nothing. He groped for the light switch, found it, snapped it, but nothing happened. If all wires were down in the storm, that might explain the silent burglar alarm. He began to grope his way toward the shelves. Suddenly he felt her beside him, there in the murk.

“If you’ve got the nerve, I have.”

She was looking square into his eyes, and he felt a throb of excitement.

“The worst they can do is put us in jail. Well... I been there before, haven’t I? Plenty of times — but I’m still here.”

He turned to the shelves again, didn’t see her look at him queerly, hesitate, and start to leave before deciding to follow him. His hand touched something and he gave an exclamation.

“What is it, Jack?”

“Matches! Now we’re coming.”

Lighting matches, poking and peering, they located the canned goods section.

“Here’s soup. My, Jack, that’ll be good!”

“O.K. on soup.”

“What kind do you like?

“Any kind. So it’s got meat in it.”

“Mulligatawny?”

“Take two. Small size, so they’ll heat quick.”

“Peas?”

“O.K.”

She set the cans on the counter, but he continued searching, and presently yelled:

“Got it, Flora, got it! I knew it had to be there!”

“What is it, Jack?”

“Chicken! Canned chicken! Just look at it!”

He found currant jelly, found instant coffee, condensed milk, a package of lump sugar, found cigarettes.

“O.K., Flora. Anything else you want?”

“I can’t think of anything else, Jack.”

“Let’s go.”

When they got back to the house again, it was dark. He put more wood on the fire, went back to the kitchen, filled the bucket again. When he returned, to put it on the fire, he noticed she had put on her stockings, sweater, and skirt. He felt his own denims. They were dry. He put them on. But when he went to put on his shoes his feet recoiled from their cold dampness. He let them lie, sat down, and pulled the robe over his feet. She started to laugh.

“Wonder what we’re going to eat off of?”

“We’ll soon fix that.”

He found the saw, found a piece of smooth board, sawed off two squares. “How’s that?”

“Fine. Just like plates.”

“Here’s a couple of chisels for forks.”

“We sure do help ourselves.”

“If you don’t help yourself, nobody’ll do it for you.”

When the water began to steam, they dropped the cans in — the big can of chicken shaped like a flatiron first, the others on top of it. They sat side by side and watched. After a while they fished out the soup, and he took a chisel and hammer and neatly excised the tops. “Take it easy, Flora. Watch you don’t cut your lip.”

They put the cans to their mouths, drank. “Oh, is that good! Is that good!” Her voice throbbed as she spoke.

Panting, they gulped the soup, tilting the cans to let the meat and vegetables slip down their throats.

They fished out the other cans then, and he opened them, the chicken last. She took it by a leg and quickly lifted it to one of their plates.

“Don’t spill the juice. We’ll drink that out of the can.”

“I haven’t spilled a drop, Flora. Wait a minute. There’s a knife here, I’ll cut it in half.”

He jumped up, looked for the carpenter’s trimming knife he had used to whittle the kindling. He couldn’t find it.

“Damn it, there was a knife here. What did I do with it?”

She said nothing.

He cut the chicken in half with the hammer and chisel. They ate like a pair of animals, sometimes stopping to gasp for breath. Presently nothing was left but wet spots on the board plates. He got fresh water and set it on the fire. It heated quickly. He went to the kitchen, washed out the soup cans, came back, made the coffee in them. He opened the milk and sugar, gave each can a judicious dose.

“There you are, Flora. You can stir it with a chisel.”

“That’s just what I was wishing for all the time — that I could have a good cup of coffee, and then it would be perfect.”

“Is it O.K.?”

“Grand.”

He offered her a cigarette, but she said she didn’t smoke. He lit up, inhaled, lay back on the couch of tar paper. He was warm, full, and content. He watched her when she got up and cleared away the cans and bucket. She found a rag in the tool kit, dipped it in the last of the hot water.

“Don’t you want me to wipe the grease off your hands?”

He held out his hands, and she wiped them. She wiped her own hands, put the rag with the other stuff, sat down beside him. He held out his hand, open. She hesitated, looked at him a moment as she had looked at him in the store, put her hand in his.

“We ain’t got it so bad, Flora.”

“I’ll say we haven’t. Not to what we might have. We could have been drowned.”

He put his arm around her, drew her to him. She let her head fall on his shoulder. He could smell her hair, and his throat contracted, as though he were going to cry. For the first time in his short battered life he was happy. His grip on her tightened, he pushed his cheek against hers. She buried her face in his neck. He kept nuzzling her, felt his lips nearing her mouth. Then he pulled her to him hard, felt her yield, turn her head for his kiss.

Convulsively he winced. There was a sharp pain in the pit of his stomach. He looked down, saw something rough and putty-stained about the neck of her sweater. Instantly he knew what it was, what it was there for. He jumped up.

“So — that’s where the knife was. I pull you out of the gutter, feed you, take you in my arms, and all the time you’re getting ready to stick me in the back with that thing.”

She started to cry. “I never saw you before. You said you’d been in jail, and I didn’t know what you were fixing to do to me!”

He lit a cigarette, walked around the room. Once more he felt cold, forlorn, and bitter, the way he felt on the road. He looked out. The rain was slackening. He threw away the cigarette, sat down on the floor, drove his feet into the cold clammy shoes. Savagely he knotted the stiff laces. Then, without a word to her, he went slogging out into the night.

Joy Ride to Glory

I was assigned to the kitchen, dipping grub for the guards, not the cons like the radio said I was. I had been in the laundry, but my fingers and toes all swelled up and I got a ringing in the ears from the liquid soap, so they switched me to the kitchen. My name is Red Conley. If you don’t quite recollect who Red Conley is, go down to the public library and look him up in the Los Angeles newspapers. You’ll find out a funny thing about him. According to them write-ups, Red Conley is dead.

It had been raining all morning, and around eleven the meat truck drives up. They let it right in the yard, and Cookie yells for me and Bugs Calenso to unload it. Bugs, he’s got three concurrents and two consecutives running against him, and some of it’s violation of parole, so they don’t bother to figure it up any more. Along about 2042, with good behavior and friends on the outside, he’s eligible. Me, I’m in for rolling six tires down the hill from Mullins’s Garage, which seemed to be a good idea at the time, but I was doing a one-to-five before we even got the papers off them. Still, I had served a year, and was up for parole, and it looked O.K., and if I’d let it ride I’d have been out in a month.

So me and Bugs, we split it up with me handling the meat, account I’m younger, and him handling the hooks, account he knows how. I’d pull out a quarter of beef, then brace under it, then come up. Then I’d tote it to the cold storage room, and Bugs would catch it with the hook that swiveled to the overhead trolley. Then he’d throw the switch and I’d shove the stuff in place, the forequarters on one rail, the hindquarters on another. There was four steers on the truck, two of them for someplace down the line, two of them for the prison. That meant eight quarters of meat, and I guess I took ten minutes, because beef is not feathers, and I needed a rest in between. But then it was all moved, and Bugs give a yelp for the driver, who was not outside, where he generally waited, but inside, account of the rain. So he yelped back, from inside the corridors someplace, and then we hollered some more and said what was he doing, stalling around so he could get a free meal off the taxpayers of the state of California, and why don’t he take away his truck? So Cookie joins in, and quite a few joins in, and some very good gags was made, and it was against the rules but it felt good to holler.

So Bugs was grinning at me, standing there in the door, but then all of a sudden he wasn’t grinning any more and he was looking at me hard. Then overhead I hear the planes. You understand how this was? The kitchen door is out back, and there’s a guard on that part of the wall. But he’s a spotter, see? He’s a spotter for the army, and just to make sure, he spots everything, and there he is now, with his rifle over one arm and his head thrown back, to see what’s coming. Three fast ones break out of a cloud, the split-tail jobs with two motors, but Bugs, he don’t wait. He motions to me and we take two steps. Then he checks front and I check rear. Then he vaults in the truck and I follow him. Then we lay down, in between quarters of beef.

We were hardly flat when the driver came out, still yelling gags at the guys in the kitchen. He climbs in, starts, rolls a little way, and stops, and we hear him say something to the guards at the gate. Then he gets going again, and starts down the hill on the motor, so it begins to backfire. He goes so fast I have to lock my throat to keep the wind from being shook out of me, ha-ha-ha-ha like that. Bugs, he seems to be having the same kind of trouble, but we both hang on and choke it back, whatever the driver might hear. He’s a little fat guy, and he sings the “Prisoner’s Song” pretty lousy, but he slows down for the boulevard stop at the bottom of the hill. That was when Bugs grabs my neck for a handhold and stands up. He stands right over me, so I can see his face, where it’s all twisted with this maniac look, and his hands, where they were hooked to come in on the driver’s neck.

Then I woke up for the first time to the spot I was in. Here, with one month to go only, I had got myself in the same truck with this killer, and made myself just as guilty of whatever was done as he was. I yelled at the driver then, as loud as I could scream. He hit the brake and turned around, but he was too late. That jerk threw Bugs right on top of him, and them hooks came together so his tongue popped out of his mouth. I grabbed at Bugs and begged him to quit, but then I woke up to what was going on outside. The truck was still rolling, and if something wasn’t done in about two seconds it was going over in the ditch. I reached over and grabbed the wheel, then I slid over the seat on my belly till I was on the right-hand side beside the driver, so with my left foot I could shove down the brake.

All during that time the driver was being pulled over backwards, so he arched up till his knees touched the wheel. Then something cracked, and I felt sick to my stomach. Then it wasn’t the driver back of the wheel, it was Bugs. He was panting like some kind of an animal, but he threw it in gear and we started off. Pretty soon he says: “Get back there, go through his pockets, and find his cigarettes.”

“Get back there yourself.”

“Oh, just a passenger, hey?”

“Just a fall guy, maybe.”

“O.K., fall guy, suppose you keep an eye out behind, see if they’re following us. Because if they’re not, maybe we still got a little time, before it’s a general alarm.”

“Haven’t you got a mirror?”

“Oh, just a passenger after all, hey?”

“What you kill that guy for?”

“What you think I killed him for? So he cooperates, and he’s doing it. Like he is now, he don’t give no trouble.”

“We could have tied him up, or dropped him off, or knocked him out. We could have handled him somehow, so they wouldn’t have this on us.”

“You done all you could.”

“You bet I did.”

“I hope he appreciates it.”

“Shut up and drive.”

“Says who?”

I hauled off and let him have it, right in the mouth. His foot came off the gas, and we slowed, and I stamped on the brake, and we stopped. I let him have it again, so the blood spurted out of his lip. Then I grabbed him, jerked him out from behind the wheel, and drove my fist in till my arm was numb and his face looked like something the butcher would pitch in the bucket. Then I kicked him into my seat, took the wheel myself, and went on. It didn’t do any good. We were in the same old truck, with the rain pouring down in front, a dead man in behind, and headed nowhere. But it made me feel better.

On the dashboard was a button at the top of what looked like a grill, and I give it a twist. Plenty of drivers have shortwave, so they can pick up the police calls, and I figured I could find out what was being done about us. But ’stead of a grill it was a panel, and it opened up on a compartment full of cigarettes, chewing gum, maps, apples, and what looked to me like a flashlight. I took the cigarettes and lit up, and had me a deep inhale, and all the time he was looking at me, and I was wondering whether to give him one, just because he couldn’t help being like he was, and anyway I’d done all I wanted to do to him, and maybe more than I really wanted to do. I began sliding one out of the pack, when he moved. When I looked up I knew that flashlight wasn’t a flashlight at all, it was a automatic. Because I was looking straight into it.

“Rat, you listening what I say?”

“I hear every word, Bugs.”

“Drive.”

“I’m driving.”

“Drive like I tell you to drive.”

“Just say it, Bugs.”

He told me, and we began a zigzag course, part on the main highways, part on the crossroads, but as near as I could tell we were zigzagging for Los Angeles, and getting there. Then we had to stop for a freight that was crossing. Ahead of us was a green sedan, and for a while Bugs sat there looking at it and bearing down on some chocolate bars he found in with the apple. Then he sits up and says: “Bump him! Bump him!”

“What do you mean, bump him?”

“Bump him so he has to get out!”

I came up slow, then stepped on it so I smacked right into the rear bumper of the sedan. I no sooner untangled than Bugs jumped out and ran around front, shoving the gun in his pants as he went. Sure enough, the guy gets out, and Bugs began yelling and pointing at the truck. But the guy can’t make any sense out of it because he’s looking at Bugs’s face, where it’s still running blood, and he can’t connect all that grief with the little bump he felt. Bugs just keeps on talking. All that time the freight is going by, and he can’t take a chance the train crew might hop off to help some guy out. But soon as the bell stops he whips out the gun and tells the guy to peel off his clothes and hand over his dough. I hop out then, and run around the right-hand side and jump in the sedan and slide over behind the wheel. But Bugs thought of that. By the time I was set he had the guy out front, blocking me off. The guy’s taking orders now, and each piece of his clothes he peels, Bugs lays it on the hood and covers it with the guy’s raincoat. When the guy’s stripped naked, so his teeth are chattering and he’s begging Bugs not to keep him out there in the rain any more, Bugs plugs him. It was like something in a movie. First I could see them in front, on the other side of this pile of clothes on the hood, then comes the shot, and I can see Bugs and I can’t see him. Then Bugs has scooped up the clothes under his arm and is jumping in the back door of the sedan, telling me to drive. I start up, and I cut the wheel hard left. But the right side of the car goes up, then bumps down, as we go over something soft.

When Bugs climbed up in the front seat, maybe a half hour later, he was all dressed up in the guy’s clothes and his face was wiped off a little. He didn’t really look good, but he wasn’t in prison denims, like I was, and he could take out some money and count it. There was quite a little money, and he took quite a while. Then he says: “I guess you wonder why you killed him too?”

“You’re running it, Bugs.”

“Nekkid like he is, they may be quite a while identifying him, see? Without any driver’s license, or Elks’ pin, or tailor’s label, or that stuff they generally go on, they might be some little time. Well, all that time we’re moving, you get it, stupid? We’re on our way, and they don’t know what car we got, or the number of it, or anything at all, except we’re not no longer hauling meat. Pretty, isn’t it?”

“Oh, it’s clever. I can see that.”

“I killed him so he can’t talk to the cops and tell them what they might want to know. Of course, we all know you killed him.”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“What do you mean, ‘that’s right’?”

“I mean if you say I killed him.”

“Quit cracking smart.”

“O.K.”

“And quit chattering them teeth.”

Changing cars I had got wet, and he hadn’t give me any chocolate bars, and I was cold and hungry and weak, and my teeth were chattering all right. I bit down on them, and they stopped. It was four or five in the afternoon by then, and we were in Los Angeles already, and I began wondering why he didn’t kill me. He had everything he wanted, a car, a suit, a raincoat, and dough. He didn’t need me any more. Then I got this awful sensation in the pit of my stomach, when I saw he was going to kill me, and it was just a question of when. He sat there staring at me, the gun in his lap, and I figured it would be at the next stop. So when we come to it I went right through. He snarled like a mad dog. “What’s the big idea, going through that light?”

“I didn’t see it.”

“I told you quit cracking smart.”

“I swear I didn’t see it.”

“You want some cops stopping us?”

“If you don’t see it, why would you stop?”

“You stop at the next one, though.”

“Oh, sure.”

The next one, I went through at seventy, and he began to scream. He’d have plugged me right there, but at that speed he was afraid. But I had the mirror and he didn’t, and back of us I see a light, just a single. Then behind that there’s another one, and then still another. I hold on seventy, but they begin closing in. The next light, I come off the gas, like I’m going to do like I’m told, and stop. I feel him tighten, and aim the gun. When we dropped to forty I hit the brake and cut the wheel. We spun around like something crazy. Inside, it’s like we’ve exploded, because he’s thrown on the floor but he shoots just the same. Whether I’m hit I don’t know, but I throw open the door and jump. Inside there’s more shots, and outside the motorcycles deploy, all three guns barking. I start to run, then I go down. But I don’t lay there. Because it was the torrent in the gutter that threw me, and it rushed me along like I was a hunk of rubble. I try to get up and can’t. Then all of a sudden it’s pitch dark and I’m falling. Then I crash down, so I think my back is broken. Then the water is rushing me along again, and I tumble where I am.

I’m in a storm drain.

They have them all over the city, some little, made out of terra-cotta pipe, some big, made out of concrete sections. They run under streets, and every so often there’s a manhole, so they can clean them out, and off under the sidewalks are intakes, to tap the flow in the gutter. In the intakes, they got handholds and bars, just in case somebody did fall in, and if I’d been quick I might have saved myself, but I was too crossed up. How big the pipe was that I was in I don’t know, but at a guess I would say three feet, maybe. In that was running about a foot of water, and I was bumping along with it, feet first. I kept trying to stop, but I couldn’t. Over my face all the time the water kept pouring, and I kept gasping for air, and every time I’d gasp I’d swallow a gallon and then start over again.

How long that went on I don’t know. It seemed like an hour, but figuring it up now, I’d say about a minute. Then I see some gray light, and almost before I knew it, I was shooting past another intake pipe. I caught it, and four or five feet away, I could see bars. I reached and tried to grab one, but the water was pulling me back. I slipped off and went helloing down the black pipe again, still trying to breathe, still strangling from the water that was pouring over me. But my mind began to work, anyway a little bit. I knew there’d be another intake further on, and I set myself to watch for it and grab for a handhold. But I was watching on the right-hand side, where the other one had come in, and I shot right by one on the left. Then a couple more went by and I began to scream. It came to me, somehow, what a no-account life I’d led, and here I was, winding it up like a rat in a sewer, and even with the water in my mouth I began to scream like a maniac.

I saw light again, and got ready, but it wasn’t an intake this time. It was a grating over a big square drain that my pipe spilled me into, and then I really began to move, and for just that long I could breathe better and my back didn’t bump any more, because it was deeper. I put my head up, and there must have been two feet of clearance above me. But then I noticed there wasn’t that much, and pretty soon I knew why. Every so often pipes came roaring in, and each one filled the big drain fuller, and pretty soon it would be running full with no air, like a water pipe. I wasn’t screaming any more. I had just give up. I was going along, but I didn’t care any more.

Pretty soon something clipped my nose, and I put up my hands. I almost died then, because the top was only six inches from my face. There was a roar, and I figured another pipe was coming in. I knew I was up tight, and drew the biggest breath I could. When the top bumped my face I pushed down under to keep it away. Then I rolled over. I could feel the top bumping my back, and I kept telling myself I mustn’t breathe. I had that many seconds to live till I breathed, and I clamped down on my throat like I had in the truck, when we were bumping down the hill. Then something bumped my belly, and I breathed. But what I breathed was air. I opened my eyes and it was almost dark, and street lights were on, and I was washed up on a slab of concrete in the middle of water that was boiling all around me. About twenty feet away I could see the square mouth of a drain, and I figured it was what I come out of. It was at least five minutes, I guess, before I doped it out I was in the middle of the Los Angeles River.

I won’t tell you much about how I got out of there, about the guy that seen me, and stopped his car, and found a length of rubber hose, and threw me one end of it, and then ran me home, and wrapped me in blankets, and opened up a can of hot soup, and then give me hot coffee and hot milk mixed, and then put me to bed. If I told you too much, maybe you could figure out who he is, and he’d be in more trouble than I’m worth. And anyway, what I want to tell about, what I been leading up to all this time, was next morning, when he come in the little room he had put me in, and sat down beside the bed, and it was just him and me. He kind of mentioned that his wife and little boy were visiting her folks over the weekend, and I got the idea that was what he was trying to tell me, that it was just him and me, that nobody else knew anything. After a while he says: “What’s your name?”

“...Bud O’Brien’s my name.”

“Funny. I thought it was Conley.”

“What made you think that?”

“There was a convict named Conley that made his escape yesterday. From the stencil marks on those denims you were wearing, I figured you came from a prison yourself.”

“In that case, you might be right.”

“Want to read about it, Conley?”

“Yeah, I’d kind of like to.”

He went out and came back with the papers, and it was all plastered over the front pages how me and Bugs had slipped out in the meat truck, killed the driver, then killed another guy and taken his car, then been shot by the cops, with Bugs wounding a cop before they got him, and my body washing down the storm drain. Identification was certain, though, it said, because a cop recognized me before I went down. So I read all that stuff, and then I started to talk, and I told the guy what I’ve just told you, and ’specially I tried to make him believe I never killed anybody, which I didn’t. He listened, and sat there a long time, and then he said: “I figured it might be something like that. ’Specially when I read that item that covered Calenso’s record and your record... All right, let’s say it’s true, the way you tell it. Well — O.K. I guess I really believe it. You didn’t kill anybody, and you’re dead. So far as the cops are concerned, they know they got you, and that means that today, this Sunday morning, you can, if I say the word, begin a new life. Suppose I do say the word, what then? What are you going to do with this life?”

Well, what was I going to say? The last I did any thinking about my life, I was ten feet under the street, in a drain pipe that was drowning me so fast I couldn’t see myself sink, and I wasn’t ready to talk. I began mumbling about I hope I would die if I ever pulled any crooked stuff again, and how I sure was going to get a job and go to work, and he listened, and then cut me off short. “That’s not good enough, Conley.”

“It’s all I know to do.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-three.”

“There’s just one place for a guy your age, these days, with your country in a war. Just one place, and you haven’t once mentioned it.”

“Well, I’m all registered up.”

“You sure of that?”

“You bet I’m registered up. O.K., so it’s the army, but don’t you think I’d have been in it long ago if it hadn’t been for that rap I was doing?”

“Which is your draft board?”

We talked for a minute about that, and then we both seen that wouldn’t do, because even if I give a new name to the draft board, the fingerprints would trip me, and then all of a sudden I said: “O.K., mister, I got it. This man’s army, the one we got, it can’t take me, because before it does, it’s got to turn me over to the state of California to die for what Bugs Calenso done. But that’s not the only army. There’s other armies—”

He looked up and come over and shook hands. So that’s where I am now, on my way to another army, that’s fighting for the same thing and that needs guys just as much as our army does. And I’m writing this on the deck of a freighter headed west, and the agreement is I mail it to him, to prove I did like I promised. If it all goes O.K., he keeps this locked up, and that’s that. If something goes wrong, and the ship gets it, or maybe my number goes up and I check in over there, why then maybe he hands it to some guy, to be printed if somebody wants to read it. So—

Say, that’s a funny one. Them reporters, they generally get it right, don’t they? Because now, if you happen to read this, why then Red Conley, he is dead!

Pay-Off Girl

I met her a month ago at a little café called Mike’s Joint, in Cottage City, Maryland, a town just over the District line from Washington, D. C. As to what she was doing in this lovely honkytonk, I’ll get to it, all in due time. As to what I was doing there, I’m not at all sure that I know as it wasn’t my kind of place. But even a code clerk gets restless, especially if he used to dream about being a diplomat and he wound up behind a glass partition, unscrambling cables. And on top of that was my father out in San Diego, who kept writing me sarcastic letters telling how an A-1 canned-goods salesman had turned into a Z-99 government punk, and wanting to know when I’d start working for him again, and making some money. And on top of that was Washington, with the suicide climate it has, which to a Californian is the same as death, only worse.

Or it may have been lack of character. But whatever it was, there I sat, at the end of the bar, having a bottle of beer, when from behind me came a voice: “Mike, a light in that ’phone booth would help. People could see to dial. And that candle in there smells bad.”

“Yes, Miss, I’ll get a bulb.”

“I know, Mike, but when?”

“I’ll get one.”

She spoke low, but meant business. He tossed some cubes in a glass and made her iced coffee, and she took the next stool to drink it. As soon as I could see her I got a stifled feeling. She was blonde, a bit younger than I am, which is 25, medium size, with quite a shape, and good-looking enough, though maybe no raving beauty. But what cut my wind were the clothes and the way she wore them. She had on a peasant blouse, with big orange beads dipping into the neck, black shoes with high heels and fancy lattice-work straps, and a pleated orange skirt that flickered around her like flame. And to me, born right on the border, that outfit spelled Mexico, but hot Mexico, with chili, castanets, and hat dancing in it, which I love. I looked all the law allowed, and then had to do eyes front, as she began looking, at her beads, at her clothes, at her feet, to see what the trouble was.

Soon a guy came in and said the bookies had sent him here to get paid off on a horse. Mike said have a seat, the young lady would take care of him. She said: “At the table in the corner. I’ll be there directly.”

I sipped my beer and thought it over. If I say I liked that she was pay-off girl from some bookies, I’m not telling the truth, and if I say it made any difference, I’m telling a downright lie. I just didn’t care, because my throat had talked to my mouth, which was so dry the beer rasped through it. I watched her while she finished her coffee, went to the table, and opened a leather case she’d been holding in her lap. She took out a tiny adding machine, some typewritten sheets of paper, and a box of little manila envelopes. She handed the guy a pen, had him sign one of the sheets, and gave him one of the envelopes. Then she picked up the pen and made a note on the sheet. He came to the bar and ordered a drink. Mike winked at me. He said: “They make a nice class of business, gamblers do. When they win they want a drink, and when they lose they need one.”

More guys came, and also girls, until they formed a line, and when they were done at the table they crowded up to the bar. She gave some of them envelopes, but not all. Quite a few paid her, and she’d tap the adding machine. Then she had a lull. I paid form my beer, counted ten, swallowed three times, and went over to her table. When she looked up I took off my hat and said: “How do I bet on horses?”

“... You sure you want to?”

“I think so.”

“You know it’s against the law?”

“I’ve heard it is.”

“I didn’t say it was wrong. It’s legal at the tracks, and what’s all right one place can’t be any holing outrage some place else, looks like. But you should know how it is.”

“Okay, I know.”

“Then sit down and I’ll explain.”

We talked jerky, with breaks between, and she seemed as rattled as I was. When I got camped down, though, it changed. She drew a long trembly breath and said: “It has to be done by telephone. These gentlemen, the ones making the book, cant have a mob around, so it’s all done on your word, like in an auction room, where a nod is as good as a bond, and people don’t rat on their bids. I take your name, address, and phone, and when you’re looked up you’ll get a call. They give you a number, and from then on you phone in and your name will be good for your bets.”

“My name is Miles Kearny.”

She wrote it on an envelope, with my phone and address, an apartment in southeast Washington. I took the pen from her hand, rubbed ink on my signet right, and pressed the ring on the envelope, so the little coronet, with the three tulips over it, showed nice and clear. She got some ink off my hand with her blotter, then studied the impression on the envelope. She said: “Are you a prince or something?”

“No, but it’s been in the family. And it’s one way to get my hand held. And pave the way for me to ask something.”

“Which is?”

“Are you from the West?”

“No, I’m not. I’m from Ohio. Why?”

“And you’ve never lived in Mexico?”

“No, but I love Mexican clothes.”

“Then that explains it.”

“Explains what?”

“How you come to look that way and — and how I came to fall for you. I am from the West. Southern California.”

She got badly rattled again and after a long break said: “Have you got it straight now? About losses? They have to be paid.”

“I generally pay what I owe.”

There was a long, queer break then, and she seemed to have something on her mind. At last she blurted out: “And do you really want in?”

“Listen, I’m over twenty-one.”

“In’s easy. Out’s not.”

“You mean it’s habit-forming?”

“I mean, be careful who you give your name to, or your address, or phone.”

“They give theirs, don’t they?”

“They give you a number.”

“Is that number yours, too?”

“I can be reached there.”

“And who do I ask for?”

“... Ruth.”

“That all the name you got?”

“In this business, yes.”

“I want in.”

Next day, by the cold gray light of Foggy Bottom, which is what they call the State Department, you’d think that I’d come to my senses and forget her. But I thought of her all day long, and that night I was back, on the same old stool, when she came in, made a call from the booth, came out, squawked about the light, and picked up her coffee to drink it. When she saw me she took it to the table. I went over, took off my hat, and said: “I rang in before I came. My apartment house. But they said no calls came in for me.”

“It generally takes a while.”

That seemed to be all, and I left. Next night it was the same, and for some nights after that. But one night she said, “Sit down,” and then: “Until they straighten it out, why don’t you bet with me? Unless, of course, you have to wait until post time. But if you’re satisfied to pick them the night before, I could take care of it.”

“You mean, you didn’t give in my name?”

“I told you, it all takes time.”

“Why didn’t you give it in?”

“Okay, let’s bet.”

I didn’t know one horse from another, but she had a racing paper there, and I picked a horse called Fresno, because he reminded me of home and at least I could remember his name. From the weights he looked like a long shot, so I played him to win, place, and show, $2 each way. He turned out an also-ran, and the next night I kicked in with $6 more and picked another horse, still trying for openings to get going with her. That went on for some nights, I hoping to break through, she hoping I’d drop out, and both of us getting nowhere. Then one night Fresno was entered again and I played him again, across the board. Next night I put down my $6, and she sat staring at me. She said: “But Fresno won.”

“Oh. Well say. Good old Fresno.”

“He paid sixty-four eighty for two.”

I didn’t much care, to tell the truth. I didn’t want her money. But she seemed quite upset. She went on: “However, the top bookie price, on any horse that wins, is twenty to one. At that I owe you forty dollars win money, twenty-two dollars place, and fourteen dollars show, plus of course the six that you bet. That’s eighty-two in all. Mr. Kearny, I’ll pay you tomorrow. I came away before the last race was run, and I just now got the results when I called in. I’m sorry, but I don’t have the money with me, and you’ll have to wait.”

“Ruth, I told you from the first, my weakness isn’t horses. It’s you. If six bucks a night is the ante, okay, that’s how it is, and dirt cheap. But if you’ll act as a girl ought to act, quit holding out on me, what your name is and how I get in touch, I’ll quit giving an imitation of a third-rate gambler, and we’ll both quit worrying whether you pay me or not. We’ll start over, and—”

“What do you mean, act as a girl ought to act?”

“I mean go out with me.”

“On this job how can i?”

“Somebody making you hold it?”

“They might be, at that.”

“With a gun to your head, maybe?”

“They got ’em, don’t worry.”

“There’s only one thing wrong with that. Some other girl and a gun, that might be her reason. But not you. You don’t say yes to a gun, or to anybody giving you orders, or trying to. If you did, I wouldn’t be here.”

She sat looking down in her lap, and then, in a very low voice: “I don’t say I was forced. I do say, when you’re young you can be a fool. Then people can do things to you. And you might try to get back, for spite. Once you start that, you’ll be in too deep to pull out.”

“Oh, you could pill out, if you tried.”

“How, for instance?”

“Marrying me is one way.”

“Me, a pay-off girl for a gang of bookies, marry Miles Kearny, a guy with a crown on his ring and a father that owns a big business and a mother — who’s your mother, by the way?”

“My mother’s dead.”

“I’m sorry.”

We had dead air for a while, and she said: “Mr. Kearny, men like you don’t marry girls like me, at least to live wit them and like it. Maybe a wife can have cross eyes or buck teeth; but she can’t have a past.”

“Ruth, I told you, my first night here, I’m from California, where we’ve got present and future. There isn’t any past. Too many of their grand-mothers did what you do, they worked for gambling houses. They dealt so much faro and rolled so many dice and spun so many roulette wheels, in Sacramento and Virginia City and San Francisco, they don’t talk about the past. You go tot admit they made a good state though, those old ladies and their children. They made the best there is, and that’ where I’d be taking you, and that’s why we’d be happy.”

“It’s out.”

“Are you married, Ruth?”

“No, but it’s out.”

“Why is it?”

“I’ll pay you tomorrow night.”

Next night the place was full, because a lot of them had bet a favorite that came in and they were celebrating their luck. When she’d paid them off she motioned and I went over. She picked up eight tens and two ones and handed them to me, and to get away from the argument I took the bills and put them in my wallet. Then I tried to start where we’d left off the night before, but she held out her hand and said: “Mr. Kearny, it’s been wonderful knowing you, especially knowing someone who always takes off his hat. I’ve wanted to tell you that. But don’t come any more. I won’t see you any more, or accept bets, or anything. Goodbye, and good luck.”

“I’m not letting you go.”

“Aren’t you taking my hand?”

“We’re getting married, tonight.”

Tears squirted out of her eyes, and she said: “Where?”

“Elkton. They got day and night service, for license, preacher and witnesses. Maybe not the way we’d want it done, but it’s one way. And it’s a two-hour drive in my car.”

“What about—?” She waved at the bag, equipment, and money.

I said: “I tell you, I’ll look it all up to make sure, but I’m under the impression — just a hunch — that they got parcel post now, so we can lock, seal, and mail it. How’s that?”

“You sure are a wheedling cowboy.”

“Might be, I love you.”

“Might be, that does it.”

We fixed it up then, whispering fast, how I’d wait outside in the car while she stuck around to pay the last few winners, which she said would make it easier. So I sat there, knowing I could still drive off, and not even for a second wanting to. All I could think about was how sweet she was, how happy the old man would be, and how happy our life would be, all full of love and hope and California sunshine. Some people went in the café, and a whole slew came out. The juke box started, a tune called Night and Day, then played it again and again.

Then it came to me: I’d been there quite a while. I wondered if something was wrong, if maybe she had taken a powder. I got up, walked to the café, and peeped. She was still there, at the table. But a guy was standing beside her, with his hat on, and if it was the way he talked or the way he held himself, as to that I couldn’t be sure, but I thought he looked kind of mean. I started in. Mike was blocking the door. He said: “Pal, come back later. Just now I’m kind of full.”

“Full? Your crowd’s leaving.”

“Yeah, but the cops are watching me.”

“Hey, what is this?”

He’d sort of mumbled, but I roared it, and as he’s little and I’m big it took less than a second for him to bounce off me and for me to start past the bar. But the guy heard it, and as I headed for him he headed for me. We met a few feet from her table, and she was white as a sheet. He was tall, thin, and sporty-looking, in a light, double-breasted suit, and I didn’t stop until I bumped him and he had to back up. Some girl screamed. I said: “What seems to be the trouble?”

He tuned to Mike and said, “Mike, who’s your friend?”

“I don’t know, Tony. Some jerk.”

He said to her: “Ruth, who is he?”

“How would I know?”

“He’s not a friend, by chance?”

“I never saw him before.”

I bowed to her and waved at Mike. I said: “I’m greatly obliged to you two for your thoughtful if misplaced effort to conceal my identity. You may now relax, as I propose to stand revealed.”

I turned to the guy and said: “I am a friend, as it happens, of Ruth’s and in fact considerably more. I’m going to marry her. As for you, you’re getting out.”

“I am?”

“I’ll show you.”

I let drive with a nice one-two, and you think he went down on the floor? He just wasn’t there. All that was left was perfume, a queer foreign smell, and it seemed to hang on my fist. When I found him in my sights again he was at the end of the bar, looking at me over a gun. He said: “Put ’em up.”

I did.

“Mike, get me his money.”

“Listen, Tony, I don’t pick pockets—”

“Mike!”

“Yes, Tony.”

Mike got my wallet, and did what he was told: “Take out that money, and every ten in it, hold it up to the light, here where I can see... There they are, two pinholes in Hamilton’s eyes, right where I put them before passing the jack to a crooked two-timing dame who was playing me double.”

He made me follow his gun to where she was. He leaned down to where she was. He leaned down to her, said: “I’m going to kill him first, so you can see him fall, so get over there, right beside him.”

She spit in his face.

Where he had me was right in front of the telephone booth, and all the time he was talking I was working the ring off. Now I could slip it up in the empty bulb socket. I pushed and the fuse blew. The place went dark. The juke box stopped with a moan, and I started with a yell. I went straight ahead, not with a one-two this time. I gave it all my weight, and when I hit him he topple over and I heard the breath go out of him. It was dark, but I knew it was him by the smell. First, I got a thumb on his mastoid and heard him scream from the pain. Then I caught his wrist and used my other thumb there. The gun dropped, it hit my foot, it was in my hand. “Mike,” I yelled, “the candle! In the booth! I’ve got his gun! But for Pete’s sake, give us some light!”

So after about three years Mike found his matches and lit up. While I was waiting I felt her arms come around me and heard her whisper in my ear: “You’ve set me free, do you still want me?”

“You bet I do!”

“Let’s go to Elkton!”

So we did, and I’m writing this on the train, stringing it out so I can watch her as she watches mesquite, sage, buttes, and the rest of the West rolling by the window. But I can’t string it out much longer. Except that we’re goof happy, and the old man is throwing handsprings, that’s all.

Period.

New Paragraph.

California, here we come.

Two O’clock Blonde

My heart did a throbby flip-flop when the buzzer sounded at last. It was all very well to ask a girl to my hotel suite, but I was new to such stuff, and before this particular girl I could easily look like a hick. It wasn’t as if she’d been just another girl, you understand. She was special, and I was serious about her.

The trouble was, for what I was up to, man-of-the-world wouldn’t do it. From the girl’s looks, accent, manners, and especially the way she was treated by the other guests, I knew she was class. So I guess ‘gentleman’ would be more like what I was shooting for. Up until now I’d always figured I was one, but then — up until now — I’d never really been called on to prove it.

I had one last look at my champagne and flowers, riffled the Venetian blind to kill the glare of the sun, her pale face, dark hair, trim figure, and maroon dress making the same lovely picture I had fallen for so hard. Everything was the same — except the expression in her eyes. It was almost as if she were surprised to see me.

I managed a grin. “Is something wrong?”

She took her time answering me. Finally she shook her head, looked away from me. “No,” she said. “Nothing’s wrong.”

I tried to act natural, but my voice sounded like the bark from a dictating machine. “Come in, come in,” I said. “Welcome to my little abode. At least it’s comfortable — and private. We’ll be able to talk, and...”

She looked at me again and broke out a hard little smile. “Tell me,” she said, “does the plane still leave at two?”

That didn’t make any more sense than the fact that she’d seemed surprised to see me. I’d told her quite a lot more, about the construction contract and how I had closed it, with the binder check in my pocket, and other stuff. But a nervous guy doesn’t argue. “I thought I explained about that,” I told her. “The plane was booked up solid, and I’m grounded here until tomorrow morning. The home office said to see the town. Have me a really good time. I... thought I’d do it with you.”

“I am indeed flattered,” she said.

She didn’t sound flattered, but I asked her once more to come in, and when she made no move I tried a fresh start. “Don’t you think it’s time you told me your name?” I asked.

Her eyes studied me carefully. “Zita,” she said.

“Just Zita? Nothing more?”

“My family name is Hungarian, somewhat difficult for American. Zita does very well.”

“Mine’s Hull,” I said. “Jack Hull.”

She didn’t say anything. The burn was still in her eyes, and I couldn’t understand it. After the several chats we’d had in the dining room and the lobby, while I waited for lawyers, contractors, and the rest during the week I’d been here, I couldn’t figure it at all. There wasn’t much I could do about it, but there’s a limit to what you can take, and I was getting a burn myself.

I was still trying to think of something to say when the door of the elevator opened, and out stepped a cute blonde in a maid’s uniform — short skirt and apron and cap, and all. I’d seen her once or twice around the hotel, but I’d paid no attention to her.

She smiled quick at me, but gasped when she saw who I was talking to. “Mademoiselle!” she said, in the same accent as Zita’s. “Mademoiselle!” Then she bobbed up and down, bending her knees and straightening them, in what seemed to be meant for bows.

But if Zita minded her being there, she didn’t show it at all. She said something to her in Hungarian, and then turned back to me. In English, she said, “This is Maria, Mr. Hull — the girl with whom you have the date.”

“I have the — what?”

“Your date is with Maria,” she said.

I stared at her, and then at Maria, and then at Zita again. If this was a joke, I didn’t feel like laughing.

“I heard Maria’s telephone conversation with you,” Zita said. “I did not know it was you then, of course, but I heard her repeat your room number.” She smiled again. “And I heard her say something about wine.”

“Listen—” I began.

“Wine...” she said. “How romantic.”

“I ordered the wine for you,” I told her. “My date was wit you, not with—”

“Yes, the wine,” she said. “Where was it to be served? On the plane perhaps? It leaves at two, you said, when you told me goodbye a little while ago. You made me feel quite sad. But at two o-clock, with a smile, comes Maria.”

I knew by then what had happened, and how important it is to get names straight before you phone — and to make sure of the person you’re talking to before you do any asking. It put quite a crimp in my pitch, and I guess I sounded weak when I go the blueprints out and tried to start all over again.

“Please,” Zita said. “Don’t apologize for the maid. She is very pretty, Mr. Hull. Very pretty.”

I opened my mouth to say something, but she didn’t wait to hear it. She went off down the hall, switching her hips very haughtily. She didn’t stop for the elevator, but left by way of the stairs.

I looked at the blonde maid. “Come in, Maria,” I said. “We’ve got a little talking to do.”

I had some idea of a message, which Maria could deliver when the situation cooled down a bit. But by the time I’d closed the door and followed Maria into the living room, I’d closed the door and followed Maria into the living room, I’d come to the conclusion that a message was not such a good idea. So I got my wallet out, took out a ten, and handed it to Maria. “I’m sorry,” I told her, “that we had to have this mix-up. I think you see the reason. Over the telephone, to an American, one accent sounds pretty much like another. I hope your feelings aren’t hurt, and that this little present will help.”

Judging by her smile, it helped quite a lot. But as she started toward the door, something started to nag at me. “What a minute,” I said. “Sit down.”

She sat down on the edge of my sofa, crossing her slim legs while I cogitated, and trying to tug the short skirt down over her knees. It was quite a display of nylon, and it didn’t make it any easier for me to think. She was an extremely well-built girl, this Maria, and she had the legs to go with the short skirt. I looked the other way, and tried to figure out this point that had popped into my mind.

“There’s an angle I don’t get, Maria,” I said. “What was she doing here?”

“You mean Mademoiselle Zita?”

I turned around to face her. “What did she come here for?”

“Didn’t she tell you?”

“Not a word. Listen, I can’t be mistaken. She knew romance was here — with wine ordered, who wouldn’t? But she didn’t know I was here. Until she saw me, I was just Mr. X. Why would she buzz Mr. X?”

I closed my eyes, working on my little mystery, and when I opened them Maria was no longer a maid making a tip. She was a ferret, watching me in a way that told me she knew the answer all right, and hoped to make it pay. That suited me fine. I got out another ten.

“Okay,” I said. “Give.”

She eyed my wallet.

She eyed my ten-spot.

She picked it up.

“It baffles me,” she said.

“Listen,” I told her. “I’m paying you.”

She walked to the door and opened it part way. She hesitated a moment, and then pushed the door shut again and walked back to where I was standing. She looked me straight in the eye, and now she was smiling. It wasn’t an especially pretty smile.

“Well?” I said.

The door buzzer sounded.

“Heavens!” Maria whispered. “I mustn’t be seen here I’d compromise you, Mr. Hull. I’ll wait in the bathroom.”

I may have wondered, as she ran in there, just what compromising you, Mr. Hull. I’ll wait in the bedroom.”

I may have wondered, as she ran in there, just what compromising was. But as I stepped into the foyer I was thinking about Zita. I was sure it was she, back to tell me some more.

I turned the knob, and then the door banged into my face. When the bells shook out of my ears, a guy was there. He stood in the middle of the living room floor, a big, think-shouldered character in Hollywood coat and slacks.

“Who the hell are you?” I asked him. “And what the hell do you want?”

“My wife’s all I want, Mister. Where is she?”

“Wife?”

“Quit acting dumb! Where is she?”

I heard the sharp sound of high heels on the floor behind me. “But, Bill!” Maria said. “What is this?”

I looked around at Maria — and got one of the biggest jolts of my life.

She didn’t have a stitch on, except those nylons and that little white cap on her head.

“You damned tramp!” Bill yelled, and made a lunge at her.

I took a seat by the window and watched them put on their act — he chasing her around, she backing away — and I woke up at last to what I’d got my foot into. When Maria had gone to the door and opened it part way, it had been a signal to this big bruiser. She couldn’t have been wearing anything under her maid’s uniform, or she couldn’t have gotten so naked so fast. And now I was the sucker in a badger game, caught like a rat in a trap. This pair had me, and unless I wanted he house detective, and maybe even the police, all I could do was grin and kick in when the bite was made.

When the ruckus began to slacken off a bit, I said, “Okay, Bill, I get it. I don’t have to be hit with a brick. What is it you’re after? Let’s hear your pitch.” I hadn’t seem any bulges on him as he circled around, and it seemed to me that a gun was the last thing he should have if his caper went slightly sour and he had to face some cops. I couldn’t be sure, of course, but by then I didn’t much give a damn.

But all he did was blink.

“What’re you after?” I asked him again.

“Dough, Mister. Just dough.”

“How much?”

“How much you got?”

I took out my wallet, squeezed it to show how thick it was, and began dealing out tens, dropping them on the cocktail table. When I’d let eight bills fall, I stopped. “That’ll do it,” I said.

“Hey,” he said, “you got more.”

“I think you’ll settle for this.”

“And what gives you that idea?”

“Well,” I said, taking my time, “I figure you for tinhorn chiselers, a pair that’ll sell out cheap. It’s worth a hundred — this eighty and the twenty I already gave her, when I’m sure she’ll tell you about — to get you out of here. I’ll just charge it to lessons in life. But for more, I’d just as soon crack it open. You want this money or not?”

It wasn’t all just talk. From Maria’s eyes as she watched the bills, I knew that for some reason they worried her. She looked at them a second, and then said to me, “Will you please bring me my uniform, Mr. Hull? Like a nice fellow?”

I didn’t know why I was being got rid of, but when I went into the bedroom and had a peep through the crack in the door, Maria was down on her knees at the table, holding my tens to the light, looking for the punctures that are sometimes put on marked money. Bill was grumbling at her, but she grumbled back, and I heard her say, “Mademoiselle Zita.”

When I heard Zita’s name, I saw red. I made up my mind I’d get to the bottom of this if I had to take the place apart piece by piece. The big problem was how. I sat down on the edge of the bed, and the more I thought about it the madder I got. I glared down at Maria’s uniform lying there on the bed beside me, and called her a few choice names under my breath. And then, still glaring at the uniform, I suddenly knew I had it. That uniform was going to be good for something besides showing off Maria’s legs.

I grabbed the uniform off the bed, went to the window and threw it out. Then I went back to the sitting room. Maria was still on her knees at the table.

“Lady,” I said, “if you want a uniform, you tell Mademoiselle Zita to bring it up here. Call her, and make it quick. Somebody else won’t do. I want to talk to her.”

“Oh,” I said. “That.”

“Give it to me!” she said. “You took it. You—”

“Well, no, Maria, I didn’t,” I said. “Not that I wouldn’t have taken it. Not that you misjudge my character. I’m just that greedy. And just that mean. I didn’t remember it, that’s all.”

“Ah!” she said. “Ah!” She was standing with her feet spread apart and her hands on her hips. I’d never seen a nude woman so completely unconscious of her body as this one was.

Bill came over from the window and slapper her — to make her pipe down with the racket, I suppose — and suddenly I realized I’d pulled a damn good stunt. It was now a question of who was trapped. All three of us were, of course, except that I didn’t care any more if the cops barged in or not. I didn’t care, but they did.

“Get on that phone,” I told Maria, “because you don’t get out till Zita comes — unless you go with the cops.”

“Call,” Bill told her. “You got to.”

He went to the phone in the foyer, put in the call, and gave Maria the receiver. She talked a long time in Hungarian, and then she hung up and came back into the living room. “She’ll be here,” she said. “She’ll bring me something to wear. And now, Mr. Hull, give me that money you threw out with my—”

I clipped her on the jaw, and I didn’t pull the punch. Bill caught her as she fell, which was his big mistake. I dived over her head and got both hands on his throat, and we all went down together.

I didn’t hit him, or take time to pull the girl away, or anything of the kind. I just lay there, squeezing my fingers into his windpipe, while he clawed at my hands and threshed. I let him thresh for one minute, clocking it by my wristwatch, which was as long as I figured him to last.

When he’d quit threshing, and lay there as limp as Maria was, I let go and dragged him away from her. I reached in his pocked and got my eighty dollars, and then I massaged his throat to give him a chance to breathe.

His fact was almost black, but he began to fight for air, sounding like a windsucker horse.

I went over a Maria and aimed a kick at her bottom.

It gave me some satisfaction, sinking my toe in like a kick from the forty-yard stripe, and listening to her groan. I did it again, and when she sad up I said, “Once more, baby — what did Zita come here for? You ready to talk about it?”

She opened her mouth to answer me, but then she saw Bill lying there and she gave a yelp and scrambled on all fours to him to help him.

I had to slap her around a little more to get it through her head that I was the most important guy in this room. And I had to ask her a question.

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s have it. What was it she came about?”

“To — warn you.” Maria said. “I knew she was becoming suspicious of Bill and me, and...”

She moistened her lips and turned to look at where Bill was still sleeping with his noisy gasps.

“The rest of it!” I said. “And hurry!”

She shrugged. “I phoned Bill right after I talked to you, so that he’d know where to come. I spoke softly — but even so, perhaps Mademoiselle Zita overheard enough to put two and two together.”

“You said she came here to warn me,” I told her. “Why didn’t she go ahead and do it?”

She shrugged again. “You ask her.”

She moved over and took Bill in her arms, and I didn’t try to stop her. I watcher her stroking his face, and I was so surprised to see that a ferret like her could love that I was a second slow on the buzzer when it sounded abruptly.

I was a little groggy from all my exertion by then, but I staggered into the foyer, closed the living room door, and opened the one to the hall.

Sure enough, Zita was there again. She was holding a dress folded across her arms.

I jerked the dressed away from her. “Come in, Zita,” I said. “Come in and join our fouled-up little party. We’re having one hell of a time here, Zita — thanks to the warning you didn’t give me.”

I took a breath, and was all ready to start in on her again, when she took a step toward me and fired a slap that stung clear down to my heels. Her eyes sparkled with anger.

“What did you expect?” she said. “You dated my maid! My maid!”

I stepped out of range and thought over what she’d just said. It could explain a lot, the warning she had expected to give some poor boob in this suite, and the warning she didn’t give when she saw that the boob was me.

The way she’d reacted when she knew it was I who had made the date with Maria was just feminine enough to be compatible with linking me pretty well.

All at once, bill started that wind-sucking sound in the living room again, a truly frightening sound. Zita grabbed the dress away from me, brushed past me, and went in there.

It wasn’t more than a minute before Bill went staggering out, and after him Maria, zipping up the dress in back and crying.

Zita came out of the living room and walked up to me slowly. She apologized then for having slapped me, and I apologized for having spoken so roughly to her, and she nodded at me and I nodded at her.

Pretty soon we were both smiling, and there didn’t seem to be much point in doing any more apologizing.

And so that was that. Starting from that moment, things moved along very smoothly, and Zita’s Hungarian accent never gave me a minute’s trouble.

It didn’t, that is, until a few afternoons later when we were faced with the novel situation of the bridegroom having to ask the bride what he should fill in under: WOMAN’S FULL NAME — PLEASE PRINT.

Death on the Beach

His name was Diego, and he was bound for Playa Washington, a beach in Northern Mexico, partly for a Sunday’s outing, partly to drum up business for the “taxi” he was driving. He was a good-looking Mexican in his late twenties, a bit taller than average, and of the café con leche color, lightly flushed with cinnamon, that bespeaks the mestizo, or mixture of Spanish and Indian. He wore khaki shorts, sport shirt, two-toned shoes, and brown cloth hat with eyelets. He whistled Cielito Lindo and glanced occasionally at the tremendous afternoon sky, but his attention was on his gauges, especially the speedometer, for the road, through improved, was rough, and tended, at too fast a clip, to heat tires and explode them. His car was a sedan, and though he operated it for hire around Matamoras, a little city on the Rio Grande, there was nothing about it that was different from any family bus.

After 22 miles from Matamoras the road ended, and he pulled off to a field, parking with other cars and leaving the road clear for the special buses that are a feature of fiestas in Mexico, and often run on rough-and-ready principles. To the boys who swarmed over him, he amiably passed out coppers, Mexican coins the size of half dollars, and to a character in snuffy cottons, who professed to be in charge, twenty-five cents American. Then, after locking up, he headed for the dunes which give this coast its special character. They are 8-10-12 feet high, of sand so bright it blazes under the sun and sends up shimmering refractions of light. The result is, the land is screened from the sea, the sea from the land, so Diego didn’t see the beach until he popped through a break in the dunes, and was in the middle of it. It was well worth the smile it brought to his face. It was a riot of color, from rugs, robes, rubber animals, and gaudy beach umbrellas; and thousands of people lolled, joked, flirted, and snoozed on it. Also, many swam, especially girls in infra-Bikini suits, with the eager zest for water that is the immemorial heritage of these people. When they went out too far, so far the porpoises offshore took an interest, the nearest Gendarme blew his whistle, calling them in. they came, but not meekly. Volubly they expressed their opinion, and volubly he answered them back. Lately, proper lifeguards have been provided for Playa Washington, with pulmotors and fancy equipment, but at this time the Gendarmes were the only supervision it had, and if they overworked their whistles, the danger, as we shall see, was real.

Diego brushed off some mariachi singers, and made his way through comestible vendors to the soft-drink stand, a tiny thatched thing on pilings, the only actual, nailed-together structure that Playa Washington had. He bought a Bimbo. As he stood swigging it from the bottle, his eye fell on a boy in red trunks who dashed through the crowd, yanking women by their shoulder straps, men by their pant-legs, boys by their ears, and girls by their hair, interspersing these pranks with challenges to wrestle. Through no more than four, such was his strength that several bigger boys got dumped on their backs in a minute or two. After each such triumph, he ran to a girl, who was seated at the foot of a dune and who seemed to be his mother. When she gave him admiration, he ran out to find more victims. “That boy,” said another customer at the stand, “is a pest. He needs treatment on his backside. He needs it tanned up good with a belt.”

“Oh,” said Diego, “he’s little.”

“So’s a goat. But I don’t like him.”

“He has his points. Sure.”

“Name me one. Name me a point.”

“Hey,” Diego called to the boy. “Hey, you.”

The boy, running over, chose a Jippo, and when Diego bought it for him, grabbed it, stuck out his tongue, and ran off. “Gil!” cried the girl on the dune. “You must thank the gentleman. Say gracias.”

“You win, she’s a point. O.K.”

The other customer surveyed her enviously as Diego strolled over lifting his hat, and she got up to smooth her skirt. She was tiny, with something doll-like about her figure, though it didn’t lack for voluptuousness. She was the color of dark red mahogany, and her features were delicate, showing little of the flat, massive moulding that goes with the Indian. Her eyes were a mischievous, flirty black, matching her hair, and her teeth, against the mulberry of her lips, looked blue. Her dress was pizen purple, but considering the form it covered, no dress could really look bad. Her shoes were red, as her bag was. At her throat were big red wooden beads. She was possibly 20 years old.

“Fine boy,” said Diego. “Quite a lad.”

“He must thank you,” she said. “—Gil!”

But Gil paid no attention, and Diego told her: “It’s nothing, let him be... He’s yours?”

“But of course.”

“And his — Papa? You’re married?”

“... Not now.”

“Perhaps you’ll have a Jippo?”

“Please, for me, Orange Crush.”

He got her Orange Crush, and they sat on the dune together. She confessed she had seen him parked, in front of the cafe where she worked, in Matamoras. He expressed surprise he hadn’t seen her, as he was in the cafe quite often. She said she didn’t serve in the dining room, but worked in the kitchen. “I am only a poor galopina,” she added, but in a flirty, provocative way. He then told her his name, and she said hers was Maria.

“You live in Matamoras?” he asked her.

“In a little jacal, by the river.”

“You and your boy?”

“I and Gil. My little Hercules.”

They had considerable talk about Gil, his exuberance, his strength, his skill at swimming, acquired in the river, which he swam several times daily, “... across to Fort Brown and back.” It was clear that if Gil was a pest to others, to her he was wonderful. However, after Diego prodded with inquiries, she admitted that if Diego would buy the boy his supper, perhaps a snack from the vendors, she had neighbors who would keep an eye on him, so they could tuck him away in the jacal, and have the evening to themselves. He mentioned he might have passengers going up, but she said that was all right, “as I can ride front with you, and hold Gil in my lap.”

“Wouldn’t mind holding you in my lap.”

“Ah-ha-ha.”

With various such sallies from him, and suitable parries from her, the discussion took a while, during which Gil outdid himself, presently arousing a gang which meant to thump him, and running into her arms. Then he darted for the sea, waited for a wave to smash, waded in, and was out, swimming, before the next one rolled in. When the Gendarme screeched his whistle, he waved derisively and kept on. The Gendarme screeched again, and Maria ran out like a little hornet to tell him off. She said Gil swam better than anyone, and it was up to stupid Gendarmes to let him alone. The Gendarme said regardless of who he swam better than, she could get him in or she’d spend the night in the carcel. Diego called “Jippo, Jippo, Jippo,” and this had the desired effect. Gill came in on a comber, ducked past the Gendarme, and ran to the stand for his Jippo. Diego led Maria back to the dune.

Things might have eased off then, but Gil had the Gendarme to settle with. Tossing the bottle away, he ran over, stuck out his tongue, made a noise. The Gendarme paid no heed. He did it again, and still the Gendarme, who was big, handsome, and cold, didn’t look, simply standing there, his hand on his pistol butt, his eye roving the beach. Gil made one more pass, then plunged into the sea as before and swam out as before. However, he went much further this time, and Maria ran down, commanding the Gendarme to whistle. Couldn’t he see that the boy was out too far? What kind of policing was this, to let a child get into danger and then do nothing about it?

“It is a beautiful day,” said the Gendarme.

“But Gil, my little Gil!”

“He swims so well, who am I to interfere?”

Maria now called to Gil but he paid no attention. Diego, joining her, repeated his previous ruse, calling “Jippo, Jippo, Jippo,” and anything else he could think of, but this time unsuccessfully. Gil simply swam on, until he was 200-300-400 yards out, and quite a few people, gathering back of the Gendarme, were beginning to take an interest. And then suddenly disaster struck. The porpoises cavorted over, obviously bent on a play, but Gil’s cry told of his terror. Then he wasn’t there, and a murmur went through the crowd. Maria started to scream. Diego put his arms around her and tried to calm her, but she broke away, and called “Gil” at the top of her lungs.

During this, which took just a few seconds, the Gendarme stared out to sea, then spoke to a boy. The boy ran down to where some girls had a raft in the sea, an inflated rubber thing they were paddling. After a shouted exchange, they wrestle it through the surf, hiked it to the boys’ shoulders, and as he ran to the Gendarme with it, followed with the paddles. The Gendarme hadn’t moved, and didn’t, during the choosing of volunteers, the relaunching of the raft, and its trip out through the swells. He stayed right where he was, his boot-heel marking the spot where Gil had gone out, so he could indicate, with wigwags, the spot where he had gone down. When the raft got there, a boy slipped over the side, but in a second or two came up, to be pulled in by a companion. Cupping his hands, he reported: The porpoises were all around, especially under the surface. One of them had bumped him, and he was sure they were fighting him off. He was afraid to go over again, and asked permission to call the search off. “Come in,” called the Gendarme. “We don’t endanger more lives for the sake of one which is lost.”

No voice was raised in protest, though many by now were watching. But as the raft started in, Maria ran at the surf, to be scooped up by the Gendarme. He held her, talked to her, threatened her. “Anyone know this girl?” he presently asked.

“I do, she’s a friend,” said Diego.

“Get her out of here,” said the Gendarme.

“I’ll do what I can.”

“Soon as I’m done with her, take her home. When the body washes in she’ll be notified. Keep her away from the water. Because if this goes on, and people have to risk their lives to save her, I’ll have to act. I won’t have any more of it.”

“My poor, poor little Gil,” sobbed Maria.

“You might have controlled him, Senora.”

“Who could control one so strong?”

“For lack of control he has drowned.”

“No! I will not believe it!”

“The cuerpo perhaps will convince you.”

Diego half carried her to the dune, whispered to her, patted her, and got her a little quieter. The Gendarme commandeered an escriban public, who came over, set up his table in front of Maria, and asked names, ages, place of residence, etc., for the official relato. It had a Doomsday sound, and upset her horribly, but at last he was done, the Gendarme signed, and he went. Maria, it appeared, could now go.

However, she didn’t, remaining where she was, a huddled heap of purple at the foot of the dune, Diego sitting beside her. The sun dropped low, and people lined up for busses. Men approached Diego to engage his car, preferring the expense to a wait, but he said he wasn’t libre. Twilight came, and quite suddenly, dark, bringing a chill to the air. It wasn’t this, however, that emptied the beach of its revelers, but the food situation, for the Playa had no facilities, and people have to eat. Soon no one was there but the soft-drink lady, the Gendarmes, taking a last look around, and the lonely pair on the dune. A vendor offered tamales, and when Diego waved him off, his boy tried to be helpful. Why wait? he wanted to know. The sharks, which come in at night, would eat the body anyhow, so what point was there in hanging around?

“Out!” screamed Maria. “No!”

“Such talk!” said the soft-drink lady. “And to a mother! About sharks!”

“It’s a well-know fact,” said the boy.

“It’s horrible!”

“Why? He’s dead, isn’t he?”

Baffled at such irrationality, he went with his father, and the soft-drink lady had a try. Maria made no response, only staring at the sea, which had changed from its day-time color, of deep indigo, to a nighttime black shot with streaks of iridescent blue, and topped at the surf by bright white feathers rushing in. the Gendarme appeared from up the beach, and clumped on down, his eyes shooting around, possibly looking for drunks buried in the sand. At last Diego took her hand. “Maria,” he said, “it is time. You do Gil no good. You only do yourself harm.”

“And you harm, is that it?”

“I don’t complain, but it is time.”

“Then, I’ll come.”

“You’re a good girl,” said the soft-drink lady.

“I’ll take you home,” said Diego.

“Whatever you say.”

“We’ll have dinner somewhere first.”

She got up, dusted the sand off her hips, got a comb from her bag and began running it through her hair.

As she stood, refastening her silver barette, a wail came from the sea. “...What was that?” she asked sharply. “Did you hear something?”

“No,” said the soft-drink lady.

“Perhaps a gull,” said Diego.

“At night, a gull?” said Maria.

The wail repeated, so no one could fail to hear it, or pretend it was only a bird. It quavered, and with an unmistakable insistence, as though intended for those on the beach.

“It is Gil!” screamed Maria. “He is there! He is calling me!.. Gil! I’m coming! Gil!”

She dashed once more at the sea, and this time it was Diego who caught her, bringing her back by main force. The soft-drink lady talked to her, but uselessly. The Gendarme came from down the beach, took in the situation, and told Maria if she didn’t stop her nonsense, he was putting her in his car, taking her to Matamoras, and locking her up for disorderly conduct. But as he started to say it all over again, to impress it on her mind, the wail came again, so even he was jolted, and stood irresolute, not knowing what to make of it.

Maria was beside herself, and as the wail kept up, seeming to come closer all the time, it was all Diego could do to hold her. Finally, motioning the Gendarme to take charge, he walked to one side, sad down, and took off his two-toned shoes. Then, stuffing his stockings into them and laying his hat on top of them, he marched down to the surf. “What are you doing?” asked the Gendarme.

“What do you think?” said Diego.

“You’re crazy.”

“If this keeps up,” Diego told him “we’ll all be crazy and that girl will be dead. She’s going after that boy, and something’s got to be done. I don’t know who that is, but if you’ll kindly hand on to her, I mean to find out.”

“Suppose it’s not a who?”

“All right then, it’s a what.”

“You may find out more than you expect.”

“At least, we’ll know.”

He faced the sea, closed his eyes in prayer, and went in. He took a comber sidewise, then straightened out and started to swim. He confessed later to a horrible fear, as it seemed to him the wail was from the other world and suggested death. He reached the spot where it seemed to come from, then was started to hear it behind him. With a sense of being cut off, he pulled his feet up, reversed direction, and started back. Then, in horror, he saw a fin and remembered the sharks. He panicked, digging for shore. Then red trucks flashed at his eyes, and Gil rose in front of him. He rose clear out of the sea, moaning as Diego insisted later, and landed plop in his arms. In utter terror by now, afraid to hold on, for fear the shark would close in, ashamed to let go, he did nothing but thresh with his feet and beat around with one free arm. But the roll of the waves was with him, and in a few moments he made it, Gill still on his shoulder. As he staggered out on the sand, Maria grabbed the boy, the soft-drink woman grabbed her, and the Gendarme grabbed Diego, thumping him on the back for his bravery, and blowing his whistle for help.

Exhausted, Diego collapsed, but revived and yelled to them all: “Work on him — give him artificial respiration! He’s alive! He spoke to me! He spoke and leaped out of the sea!”

“He’s dead,” said the soft-drink lady.

“He’s cold, so cold,” said Maria.

“Thus the tale,” said my friend, the pilot at the Brazos Santiago station, a few miles north of Playa Washington, “as I heard it around Matamoras.”

“I admit it’s spooky,” I said, “and as a feat of derring-do, quite romantic. Only trouble is, I don’t believe it.”

“I do,” he said. “That’s the difference.”

“Captain, you surprise me.”

“Maybe, but I think it’s true.”

“Shark and all?”

“Wasn’t a shark, but sharks figure in it.”

“What was it, then?”

“Porpoise.”

“And the wail, what about that?”

“That was a porpoise too.”

“Bringing the boy in to Mamma?”

“That’s just about it.”

He said, looking at the thing from the point of view of the porpoises, they were probably delighted when Gil swam out where they were, as “they love to play and love little boys. That statue they put in the picture, of a boy riding a dolphin, was not far-fetched. It has happened in the aquariums, as those things aren’t fish. They’re animals. And when Gil began to sink, their idea was, get him up to the surface again, get him breathing. So they handled him just like one of their own pups. They began bumping him up to the surface, and when the boy on the raft said they were fighting him off, he probably was telling the truth. But of course it didn’t work, and then night came on and changed the whole picture.”

“In what way, Captain?”

“The sharks.”

“Then they do come in at night?”

“Or, like most fish, they begin to bite at night.”

“So they’re more dangerous.”

“As anyone who knows them will tell you.”

“And what then?

“The porpoises began bringing him in.”

“Bumping him with their noses?”

“Exactly that.”

“To Maria?”

“I wouldn’t put it past them.”

He said the interest animals take in people is more than is commonly realized. “And in the case of porpoises,” he went on, “they talk. I’ve heard them many a time, standing watch on deck, as they swim along with the ship, especially at night. But I’m telling you, I don’t know as we sit here if they talk to themselves, each other, or me. Maybe they’re just breathing, but maybe it’s something more, and they were calling Maria that night, bringing her little boy in, saving him from the sharks. They can handle a shark — they bump him too, and hard, right in the gills, and as they bump they bite, tearing his gill feathers out. But they can’t handle all sharks all night. So they did what they could in their way. But she interested me more than they did.”

“Maria? In what way, Captain?”

“As the eternal soldadera.”

“The soldier’s girl?”

“A muchacha who must have a hero.”

“First little Gil—?”

“And then big Diego. Kind of nice.”

He told me the rest of the story, how the Gendarme, with the cuerpo recovered all the difficult questions settled, outdid himself to make things easy for her. He paced the way, in the patrol car, up to Matamoras, while she followed with Diego holding the little cold body to her warm one. He routed the undertaker out, made all the arrangements for the inquest next day, the services, and burial. He had everything fixed up in a few minutes, so when she walked out, the band was just ending its concert, in the Plaza de Hidalgo, for the same people as had been at the beach, now all dressed up for the evening.

As she sat on a bench with Diego, she felt his clothes, which were wet, clucking with concern. But he motioned toward the band. It was playing Estrellita, and suddenly she started to weep. “For you,” he said, taking her hand and drawing it through his arm. “The play to your Little Star.”

“Yes, my little Gil.”

“If I had only gone sooner!” Diego exclaimed.

“You did your best. You are now...”

She caught herself, then half defiantly, as he waited, went on: “... my Big Star. My brave one.”

“You want me, then?”

“Diego, I do...”

“And so,” said the pilot, “she lost someone, and gained someone. They’re married now, and as I hear, quite happy. Neither of them, probably, have any idea of the true explanation of what happened, but neither of them are wrong as to the amount of bravery involved. Because, my friend, would you have answered that call, in that sea, on that night? I wouldn’t, but he did.”

Mommy’s a Barfly

On the bar, in the space between the fat man’s Tom Collins and the sailor’s beer, a girl was dancing. She wore a white muslin blouse, a red print dress with shoulder straps, black shoes, and white socklets; she was an uncommonly pretty girl, she was known as Pokey, and she was four years old. As she danced, she smiled at the pianist, who thumped a tiny instrument that had been tucked under the bar, and held out her skirts. When the tune ended, she did a pirouette, bowed, and received a crackling hand. Then, from a booth, a woman came over, kissed her, and listed her down. She was a woman of medium height and undeniably arresting-looking. She was dark, and there was something slightly gaunt about her figure and haggard about her face. She would have touched tragic beauty if there hadn’t been something bummy about her.

When Pokey had run over to the soldier with whom the woman was sitting and climbed in his lap, the pianist clapped loudly and called for an encore. The bartender, who was also the owner of the place, said: “It’s OK, Fred. She taps nice and she’s sweet. But when she’s using the bar for a dance floor I can’t use it for a bar, and it’s as a bar that it pays.”

“Says who?”

“The register.”

“So?”

“Sing me a song, Fred. Not no ‘Rosie.’ Not no ‘Daisy.’ And specially not no ‘Annie.’ Something nice. Sing me a song about Paris.”

“Jake, have you become refined?”

“Them hop waltzes, they’re beer music. But a nice song about Paris, that puts people in mind to drink B&B and other imported stock that shows a profit when you move it, it’s OK.”

“Then that clears it up.”

But before Fred could sing about Paris, Pokey was back. When the fat man lifter her up, she said: “Mommy says if you want me to, I can dance once encore. And Fred, play ‘Little Glow-Worm.”

Pokey got a terrific hand that time. When she had returned to the booth, Jake made a beautiful drink of lemonade, sliced orange, cherries, and sugared mint, and carried it to Pokey. When he came back he said to Fred: “Mommy’s no good if you ask me.”

“Nobody was asking you.”

“She’s still no good.”

“She’s good-looking, though, if you ask me.”

“If you like a good-looking barfly.”

“Aren’t barflies OK? You knowing our clientele?”

“Why not?”

In response to a blonde girl’s request, Fred sang “Night and Day,” then said reflectively: “I don’t say a lot of them wouldn’t look good on a rock pile, but they’re the only clientele we got, so it’s up to us to be broad-minded.”

“Why ain’t that kid home in bed?”

“Maybe she’s not sleepy.”

“At ten o’clock at night she’s not sleepy and she’s only four years old? You know when they get tucked in at her age? She ought to been in bed with all the prayers said and doll-baby’s night diaper put on and the light put out three hours ago.”

“I give up. What’s the answer?”

“Mommy.”

“Well, she likes booze. Don’t we all?”

“And that’s not all she likes.”

“Quiz Kid, what is it now?”

“Fred, it’s the twentieth century and there’s a war going on and, like you say, with this here clientele we got to be broad-minded, but — a married woman out with a soldier cuts up the same any time, any place, and any war, and when a little kid gets mixed up in it it’s not pretty.”

“You got this woman all wrong.”

“No, I haven’t”

“You thinking about Willie?”

“I don’t think much of Willie either, so far as that goes. Every night they come in here with Pokey, and OK, you say he don’t know better. Well if not, why not? Even them rats out back don’t bring little Sissie Rat in here. Speaking of her, when she’s in here with a soldier the first night Willie don’t show, that’s all I want to know.”

“You’re doing great, except for one thing.”

“What?”

“Kind of changes things around.”

Jake stared at the man who now held Pokey in his lap, then said incredulously to Fred: “You mean that good-looking sergeant is the one she’s married to and that other pie-faced runt is her... sweetie?”

“Talk louder, so they can all hear.”

“I’m asking you.”

“Why me? She’s the one.”

After Fred had sung “Lady Be Good,” the soldier came over. He was a big, smiling man, with jet-black curly hair and a face burned the color of dark mahogany. He said to Fred: “You like my daughter, I notice.”

“Your daughter is my one and only.”

“Do me a favor?”

“Shoot.”

“Take care of her a little while, will you?

At Fred’s puzzled look, he made a sheepish face. “So I can see my wife. Since I went away she only keeps a small apartment and—”

“I got it. It’s OK.”

The soldier had been holding his hat in his hand. From it a little trickle of sand ran out on the bar. He laughed, said: “No trouble to see where I’ve been. I bumped into them on their way to the beach, so of course we couldn’t disappoint Pokey. But, being as you’re taking her for a little while, it’s kind of a nice wife I’ve got, so—”

Smiling, he went back to the booth. Jake, who had been nearby, said: “That’s what he thinks.”

“Look: He says she’s nice and he don’t think. He knows.”

“He’s kidding hisself. You see what I see?”

“I don’t see a thing.”

“Neither does he, but I do. Fred, a wife that’s wig-wagging for more Scotch in the last two hours of twenty-four-hour leave, and he hasn’t even been home yet — she’s not nice.”

Jake served the Scotch, went back to his station beside the piano. The soldier looked at the drink in surprise. Then his face darkened. Then he started to say something, but looked at the child in his arms and checked himself. Then he got up, came over with Pokey, kissed her, nodded to Fred, and set her on the bar. Then he went back to the booth, started somewhat grimly to talk.

Pokey, her face pasty by now, her stance uncertain, her brown eyes yellow from lack of sleep, blinked uncertainly, then spread her skirts as though to dance. Fred struck a chord, but Jake lifter her down, said: “Fred, get me that cushion.”

“That—?”

“Cushion. From the booth. On the end.”

The cushion, when Fred came back with it, was leather, but stuffed full and soft. Jake put it under the bar, first clearing out several cases of bottles. Then he went out the door with “his” and “her” pictures on it and came back with his street coat. Then he beckoned Pokey, who was watching him, as was everybody except the couple in the booth. Fred said: “You going to put her there?”

“I am.”

“One awful place.”

“You know a better one?”

“What’s the matter with the back room?”

“Was you ever put in a back room?”

“Anyway it’s quiet.”

“Quiet she don’t have to have. Love, she does. Listen, she ain’t no rag doll. She’s a little thing four years old that gets scared and feels lonesome and wants to cry and so would you if you wasn’t no bigger than she is that noise you et paid for, she’ll sleep right through it, so keep right on and don’t feel no embarrassment on her account if that’s what’s bothering you.”

“Don’t she get a pillow?”

“Pillows is out of date.”

“Just asking.”

“Now you know.”

Jake stooped down, put his arm around Pokey, loosened her dress, took the ribbon from around her hair, tied it to a shoulder strap so it wouldn’t get lost. Then he picker her up, put her on the little bed, spread his coat over her. It just covered her feet. Behind him, a light over the register glared down in her eyes. He turned it off. Pokey stared sleepily at Fred, said: “Play ‘Little Glow-Worm.’”

Fred played it softly and a woman at the end of the bar, who could see Pokey from where she sat, sang it. But before the little glow-worm had given its first glimmer, Pokey was asleep. The soldier in the booth stared into his glass and occasionally said something in a short, jerky way, but the woman made no move to go.

For the next hour, the place was a blue twilight, with Fred’s voice hovering over it in songs that didn’t seem to end but rather to trail off into pure sadness. Then the spell was broken by the jangle of the phone. Jake answered, but the woman in the booth was there almost as soon as he was and took the receiver from him with eager hands and spoke in low, indistinguishable tones. The soldier came over, had a look at Pokey when Fred pointed her out, said: “Gee, that’s sweet of you. I guess she’ll be all right there till my bus leaves. We didn’t go home. My wife’s been expecting this call. From the USO. Sometimes they need her on the late shift and she gave them this number. She had to stand by.”

“We all have to do our share.”

“That’s it.”

The woman returned to the booth and the soldier joined her. It was some time before Jake, who did a little visiting with is customers, returned to the piano. Then he said: “This is murder, plain murder. Every person in this room know what’s going on except two people. One’s that sergeant, because he’s stuck on her. The other is this kid under the bar, because she’s asleep.”

“Was that Willie? That called?”

“What do you think? That couple up there the ones drinking rye and soda, even made a bet that it was him, and they’re sore because I won’t tell them. It’s so raw it burns my stomach. First give the husband a runaround at the beach all day, then have the sweetie call in to find out when the bus leaves, then at one minute after twelve meet him outside, and then her and him put Pokey to bed. I wouldn’t ask much to kick her out.”

“Oh you couldn’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“All God’s chillun, you know. Maybe she came for a good time too.”

“Be a funny kind of heaven with her flying around in it. If she’s got wings, why hasn’t she got a heart?”

“For Willie, maybe she has.”

“I wish he didn’t look quite so much like a dignified weasel.”

“I wish that damned bus would go.”

Fred began to sing again and little by little the blue twilight came back. The couple in the booth were friendlier now and the soldier, who had been drinking beer, ordered double Scotch. Then abruptly Fred broke off in the middle of a song, looked at his watch. With a look of alarm, he pointed his finger at the soldier, said: “Hey!”

“Yeah?”

“It’s five minutes to twelve.”

The soldier got up, came over to the bar, picked up his hooker of Scotch, downed it in a series of gulps. After a second in which he seemed to be strangling, he said: “So what?”

“Your bus is coming.”

“Whose bus?”

“Did you forget you’re standing reveille?”

“Me and who else?”

“Listen sergeant, you like those three stripes?

“Not to the point of being silly about them.”

“You like that extra dough they bring in though, don’t you? For the little woman overt there? And the little woman under here? Pokey? So she can have a nice warm coat for school, with a little fur collar on it? And peppermint for Christmas? And—”

“Shut up.”

“I won’t shut up.”

“You will or I’m socking you.”

“OK then, I clam.”

Weaving a little, the soldier went back to the booth. The woman stared at him, looked at her watch. Then she came over to the bar. “What did he say?”

Fred made no answer. Jake swabbed a section of bar, then looked her straight in the eye and spoke slowly, quietly, deliberately; “He said he’s going AWOL so he can be with a woman that’s been two-timing him for a month, that didn’t think enough of him even to bring him home when he came all the way up here to see her, and that needn’t come back in this bar after tonight, if she don’t mind.”

How much of this after “AWOL” she actually heard, it would be hard to say. Her great black eyes opened in horror, and even after Jake had finished she stared at him. Then, breathlessly, she said: “I’ll be back in a minute,” and hurried out to the street.

Jake said: “It’s so raw it stinks.”

In a few minutes she was back, but instead of going to the booth, she flitted through the door with the pictures on it. The soldier ordered another double hooker of Scotch. Jake served a single, with soda. The soldier asked: “What time is it?”

“Little after twelve.”

“I was supposed to catch a bus.”

“It left. I seen it go by.”

“OK.”

Jake returned to the bar and Fred sang several songs. Then a woman came out of the door with the pictures on it, walked quickly around to where Jake was, leaned over, and said quietly to him: “You better get back there.”

“Back where?”

“Ladies’ room.”

“What for?”

“There’s trouble.”

Conversation stopped and the row of people perched on stools looked at each other, then looked at Jake as he walked to the door, opened it, and disappeared. The soldier wig-wagged for Scotch. Fred took a bottle to the booth, poured a drink, came back to the piano. After some minutes, Jake reappeared, went to the phone, made a call. When he came back to the bar, he said loudly: “OK, folks, one on the house — what’ll it be?”

Two or three ordered refills and the rest took the hint and began to talk. Two men paid their checks and left. When Jake got back to the piano, Fred said: “Where’s Mommy?”

“Flying around.”

“Where?”

“Heaven. Or will be soon.”

“... Why?”

“She’s going to be dead.”

“Jake, what the hell are you talking about?”

“She’s took six of the blue ones. She dissolved them all before she put them down and she won’t take anything I fix for her ad it’s too late now for anything to be done and this time tomorrow night she’s going to die. That’s what the hell I’m talking about.”

“Holy Smoke.”

“That’s right, only hit it harder.”

“Aren’t you sending her to a hospital?”

“I already called.”

“Aren’t you — staying with her?”

“She don’t want me. And—” with a jerk of a thumb toward the soldier — “She don’t want him. And I’ll not call Willie.”

“This boy has to be told.”

“Then tell him.”

Another hush had fallen over the bar. Then suddenly it was cut by a whisper: “Play ‘Little Glow-Worm.’”

Jake said: “Yes, play it. God, play something!”

When he played a few bars, Fred said: “And she’s got to be told.”

“No she hasn’t”

“How do you figure that out?”

“She’s coming with me. She’s coming with my wife and our two kids, and take the place of the one that died. Anyway till this guy is free and maybe for good. She’s going to get up with the sun and go to bed with the sun and drink milk and chase butterflies. And she’s not going to be told. Mommy just gave her to us, that’s all.”

The soldier called for “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes.” Jake said: “Get over there now and tell him. About how it was, tell him what’s good for him to know, and not nothing about Willie. About how it’s going to be, you give him the works. And get the name of his outfit. So I can get his captain on the line and explain why he’s not standing reveille.”

From the street came the sound of an ambulance siren, and soon an interne and two orderlies entered the bar. Fred stopped playing, got up, and started his dreadful walk toward the soldier in the booth.

Cigarette Girl

Bullets weren’t in Cameron’s line, but he couldn’t back out. He couldn’t leave the girl alone again.

I’d never so much as laid eyes on her before going in this place, the Here’s How, a night-club on Route 1, a few miles north of Washington, on business that was 99 % silly, but that I had to keep to myself. It was around 8 at night, with hardly anyone there, and I’d just taken a table, ordered a drink, and started to unwrap a cigar, when a whiff of perfume hit me, and she swept by with cigarettes. As to what she looked like, I had only a rear view, but the taffeta skirt, crepe blouse, and silver earrings were quiet, and the chassis was choice, call it fancy, a little smaller than medium. So far, a cigarette girl, nothing to rate any cheers, but not bad either, for a guy unattached who’d like an excuse to linger.

But then she made a pitch, or what I took for a pitch. Her middle-aged customer was trying to tell her some joke, and taking so long about it the proprietor got in the act. He was a big, blond, blocky guy, with kind of a decent face, but he went and whispered to her as though to hustle her up, for some reason apparently, I couldn’t quite figure it out. She didn’t much seem to like it, until her eye caught mine. She gave a little pout, a little shrug, a little wink, and then just stood there, smiling.

Now I know this pitch and it’s nice, because of course I smiled back, and with that I was on the hook. A smile is nature’s freeway: it has lanes, and you can go any speed you like, except you can’t go back. Not that I wanted to, as I suddenly changed my mind about the cigar I had in my hand, stuck it back in my pocket, and wigwagged for cigarettes. She nodded, and when she came over said: “You stop laughing at me.”

“Who’s laughing? Looking.”

“Oh, of course. That’s different.”

I picked out a pack, put down my buck, and got the surprise of my life: she gave me change. As she started to leave, I said: “You forgot something, maybe?”

“That’s not necessary.”

“For all this I get, I should pay.”

“All what, sir, for instance?”

“I told you: the beauty that fills my eye.”

“The best things in life are free.”

“On that basis, fair lady, some of them, here, are tops. Would you care to sit down?”

“Can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Not allowed. We got rules.”

With that she went out toward the read somewhere, and I noticed the proprietor again, just a short distance away, and realized he’d been edging in. I called him over and said: “What’s the big idea? I was talking to her.”

“Mister, she’s paid to work.”

“Yeah, she mentioned about rules, but now they got other things too. Four Freedoms, all kinds of stuff. Didn’t anyone ever tell you?”

“I heard of it, yes.”

“You’re Mr. Here’s How?”

“Jack Connor, to my friends.”

I took a V from my wallet, folded it, creased it, pushed it toward him. I said: “Jack, little note of introduction I generally carry around. I’d like you to ease these rules. She’s cute, and I crave to buy her a drink.”

He didn’t see any money, and stood for a minute thinking. Then: “Mister, you’re off on the wrong foot. In the first place, she’s not a cigarette girl. Tonight, yes, when the other girl is off. But not regular, no. in the second place, she’s not any chiselly-wink, that orders rye, drinks tea, takes the four bits you slip her, the four I charge for the drink — and is open to propositions. She’s class. she’s used to class — out West, with people that have it, and that brought her East when they came. In the third place she’s a friend, and before I eased any rules I’d have to know more about you, a whole lot more, than this note tells me.”

“My name’s Cameron.”

“Pleased to meet you and all that, but as to who you are, Mr. Cameron, and what you are, I still don’t know—”

“I’m a musician.”

“Yeah? What instrument?”

“Any of them. Guitar, mainly.”

Which brings me to what I was doing there. I do play the guitar, play it all day long, for the help I get from it, as it gives me certain chords, the big ones that people go for, and heads me off from some others, the fancy ones on the piano, that other musicians go for. I’m an arranger, based in Baltimore, and had driven down on a little tune detecting. The guy who takes most of my work, Art Lomak, the band leader, writes a few tunes himself, and had gone clean off his rocker about one he said had been stolen, or thefted as they call it. It was one he’d been playing a little, to try it and work out bugs, with lyric and title to come, soon as the idea hit him. And then he rang me, with screams. It had already gone on the air, as 20 people had told him, from this same little honky-tonk, as part of a 10 o’clock spot on the Washington FM pick-up. He begged me to be here tonight, when the trio started their broadcast, pick up such dope as I could, and tomorrow give him the low-down.

That much was right on the beam, stuff that goes on every day, a routine I knew by heart. But his tune had angles, all of them slightly peculiar. One was, it had already been written, though it was never a hit and was almost forgotten, in the days when states were hot, under the title Nevada. Another was, it had been written even before that, by a gent named Giuseppe Verdi, as part of the Sicilian Vespers, under the title O Tu Palermo. Still another was, Art was really burned, and seemed to have no idea where the thing had come from. They just can’t get it, those big schmalzburgers like him, that what leaks out of their head might, just once, have leaked in. But the twist, the reason I had to come, and couldn’t just play it for laughs, was: Art could have been right. Maybe the lift was from him, not from the original opera, or from the first theft, Nevada. It’s a natural for a ¾ beat, and that’s how Art had been playing it. So if that’s how they were doing it here, instead of with Nevada’s 4/4, which followed the Verdi signature, there might still be plenty of work for the lawyers Art had put on it, with screams, same like to me.

Silly, almost.

Spooky.

But maybe, just possibly, moola.

So Jack, this boss character, by now had smelled something fishy, and suddenly took a powder, to the stand where the fiddles were parked, as of course the boys weren’t there yet, and came back with a Spanish guitar. I took it, thanked him, and tuned. To kind of work it around, in the direction of Art’s little problem, and at the same time make like there was nothing at all to conceal, I said I’d come on account of his band, to catch it during the broadcast, as I’d heard it was pretty good. He didn’t react, which left me nowhere, but I thought it well to get going.

I played him Night and Day, no Segovia job, but plenty good, for free. On “Day and Night,” where it really opens up, I knew things to do, and talk suddenly stopped among the scattering of people that were in there. When I finished there was some little clapping, but still he didn’t react, and I gave thought to mayhem. But then a buzzer sounded, and he took another powder, out toward the rear this time, where she had disappeared. I began a little beguine, but he was back. He bowed, picked up his V, bowed again: “Mr. Cameron, the guitar did it. She heard you, and you’re in.”

“Will you set me up for two?”

“Hold on, there’s a catch.”

He said until midnight, when one of his men would take over, she was checking his orders. “That means she handles the money, and if she’s not there, I could just as well close down. You’re invited back with her, but she can’t come out with you.”

“Oh. Fine.”

“Sir, you asked for it.”

I wasn’t quite the way I’d have picked to do it, but the main thing was the girl, and I followed him through the OUT door, the one his waiters were using, still with my Spanish guitar. But then, all of a sudden, I loved it, and felt even nearer to her.

This was the works of the joint, with a little office at one side, service bar on the other, range rear and center, the crew in white all around, getting the late stuff ready. But high on a stool, off by herself, on a little railed-in platform where waiters would have to pass, she was waving at me, treating it all as a joke. She called down: “Isn’t this a balcony scene for you? You have to play me some music!”

I whapped into it quick, and when I told her it was Romeo and Juliet, she said it was just what she’d wanted. By then Jack had a stool he put next to hers, so I could sit beside her, back of her little desk. He introduced us, and it turned out her name was Stark. I climbed up and there we were, out in the middle of the air, and yet in a way private, as the crew played it funny, to the extent they played it at all, but mostly were too busy even to look. I put the guitar on the desk and kept on with the music. By the time I’d done some Showboat she was calling me Bill and to me she was Lydia. I remarked on her eyes, which were green, and showed up bright against her creamy skin and ashy blond hair. She remarked on mine, which are light, watery blue, and I wished I was something besides tall, thin, and red-haired. But it was kind of cute when she gave a little pinch and nipped one of my freckles, on my hand back of the thumb.

Then Jack was back, with champagne iced in a bucket, which I hadn’t ordered. When I remembered my drink, the one I had ordered, he said Scotch was no good, and this would be on him. I thanked him, but after he’d opened and poured, and I’d leaned the guitar in a corner and raised my glass to her, I said: “What’s made him so friendly?”

“Oh, Jack’s always friendly.”

“Not to me. Oh, no.”

“He may have thought I had it coming. Some little thing to cheer me. My last night in the place.”

“You going away?”

“M’m-h’m.”

“When?”

“Tonight.”

“That why you’re off at 12?”

“Jack tell you that?”

“He told me quite a lot.”

“Plane leaves at 1. Bag’s gone already. It’s at the airport, all check and ready to be weighed.”

She clinked her glass to mine, took a little sip, and drew a deep, trembly breath. As for me, I felt downright sick, just why I couldn’t say, as it had to all be strictly allegro, with nobody taking it serious. It struck in my throat a little when I said: “Well — happy landings. It is permitted to ask which way that plane is taking you?”

“Home.”

“And where’s that?”

“It’s — not important.”

“The West, I know that much.”

“What else did Jack tell you?”

I took it, improvised, and made up a little stuff, about her high-toned friends, her being a society brat, spoiled as all get-out, and the heavy dough she was used to — a light rib, as I thought. But it hadn’t gone very far when I saw it was missing bad. When I cut it off, she took it. She said: “Some of that’s true, in a way. I was — fortunate, we’ll call it. But — you still have no idea, have you, Bill, what I really am?”

“I’ve been playing by ear.”

“I wonder if you want to know?”

“If you don’t want to, I’d rather you didn’t say.”

None of it was turning out quite as I wanted, and I guess maybe I showed it. She studied me a little and asked: “The silver I wear, that didn’t tell you anything? Or my giving you change for your dollars? It didn’t mean anything to you, that a girl would run a straight game?”

“She’s not human.”

“It means she’s a gambler.”

And then: “Bill does that shock you?”

“No, not at all.”

“I’m not ashamed of it. Out home, it’s legal. You know where that is now?”

“Oh! Oh!”

“Why oh? And oh?”

“Nothing. It’s — Nevada, isn’t it?”

“Something wrong with Nevada?”

“No! I just woke up, that’s all.”

I guess that’s what I said, but whatever it was, she could hardly miss the upbeat in my voice. Because, of course, that wrapped it all up pretty, not only the tunes, which the band would naturally play for her, but her too, and who she was. Society dame, to tell the truth, hadn’t pleased me much, and maybe that was one reason my rib was slightly off key. But gambler I could go for, a little cold, a little dangerous, a little brave. When she was sure I had really brought it, we were close again, and after a nip on the freckle her fingers slid over my hand. She said play her Smoke — the smoke she had in her eyes. But I didn’t, and we just sat there some little time.

And then, a little bit at a time, she began to spill it: “Bill, it was just plain cock-eyed. I worked in a club, the Paddock, in Reno, a regular institution. Tony Rocco — Rock — owned it, and was the squarest bookie ever — why he was a Senator, and civic, and everything. And I worked from him, running his wires practically being his manager, with a beautiful salary, a bonus Christmas, and everything. And then wham, it struck. This federal thing. This 10 % tax on gross. And we were out of business. It just didn’t make sense. Everything else was exempted. Wheels and boards and slots, whatever you could think of, but us. Us and the numbers racket, in Harlem and Florida and Washington.”

“Take it easy.”

“That’s right, Bill. Thanks.”

“Have some wine.”

“... Rock, of course, was fixed. He had property, and for the building, where the Paddock was, he got $250,000 — or so I heard. But then came the tip on Maryland.”

That crossed me up, and instead of switching her off, I asked her what she meant. She said: “That Maryland would legalize wheels.”

“What do you smoke in Nevada?”

“Oh, I didn’t believe it. And Rock didn’t. But Mrs. Rock went nuts about it. Oh well, she had reason.”

“Dark, handsome reason?”

“I don’t want to talk about it, but that reason took the Rocks for a ride, for every cent they got for the place, and tried to take me too, for other things beside money. When they went off to Italy, they thought they had it fixed, he was to keep me at my salary, in case Maryland would legalize, and if not, to send me home, with severance pay, as it’s called. And instead of that—”

“I’m listening.”

“I’ve said too much.”

“What’s this guy to you?”

“Nothing! I never even saw him until the three of us stepped off the plane — with our hopes. In a way it seemed reasonable. Maryland had tracks, and they help with the taxes. Why not wheels?

“And who is this guy?”

“I’d be ashamed to say, but I’ll say this much: I won’t e a kept floozy. I don’t care who he thinks he is, or—”

She bit her lip, started to cry, and really shut up then. To switch off, I asked why she was working for Jack, and she said: “Why not? You can’t go home in a barrel. But he’s been swell to me.”

Saying people were swell seemed to be what she like, and she calmed down, letting her hand stay when I pressed it in both of mine. Then we were really close, close enough that I’d be warranted in laying it on the line, she should let that plane fly away, and not go to Nevada at all. But while I was working on that, business was picking up, with waiters stopping by to let her look at their trays, and I hadn’t much chance to say it, whatever I wanted to say. Then, through the IN door, a waiter came through with a tray that had a wine bottle on it. A guy followed him in, a little noisy guy, who said the bottle was full and grabbed it off the tray. He had hardly gone out, when Jack was in the door, watching him as he staggered back to the table. The waiter swore the bottle was empty, but all Jack did was nod.

Then Jack came over to her, took another little peep through the window in the OUT door, which was just under her balcony, and said: “Lydiay, what did you make of him?”

“Why — he’s drunk, that’s all.”

“You notice him, Mr. Cameron?”

“No — except it crossed my mind he wasn’t as tight as the act he was putting on.”

“Just what crossed my mind! How could he get that drunk on a split of Napa red? What did he want back here?”

by now, the waiter had gone out on the floor and come back, saying the guy wanted his check. But as he started to shuffle it out of the bunch he had tucked in his best, Jack stopped him and said: “He don’t get any check — not till I give the word. Tell Joe I said stand by and see he don’t get out. Move!”

The waiter had looked kind of blank, but hustled out as told, and then Jack looked at her. He said: “Lady, I’ll be back. I’m taking a look around.”

He went, and she drew another of her long, trembly breaths. I cut my eye around, but no one had noticed a thing, and yet it seemed kind of funny they’d all be slicing bread, wiping glass, of fixing cocktails set-ups, with Jack mumbling it low out of the side of his mouth. I had a creepy feeling of things going on, and my mind took it a little, fitting it together, what she had said about the bag checked at the airport, the guy trying to make her, and most of all, the way Jack had acted, the second she showed with her cigarettes, shooing her off the floor, getting her out of sight. She kept staring through the window, at the drunk where he sat with his bottle, and seemed to ease when a captain I took to be Joe planted himself pretty solid in a spot that would block off a run-out.

Then Jack was back, marching around, snapping his fingers, giving orders for the night. But as he passed the back door, I noticed his hand touched the lock, as though putting the catch on. He started back to the floor, but stopped as he passed her desk, and shot it quick in a whisper: “He’s out there, Lydia, parked in back. This drunk, like I thought, is a finger he sent in to spot you, but he won’t be getting out till you’re gone. You’re leaving for the airport, right now.”

“Will you call me a cab, Jack?”

“Cab? I’m taking you.”

He stepped near me and whispered: “Mr. Cameron, I’m sorry, this little lady has to leave, for—”

“I know about that.”

“She’s in danger—”

“I’ve also caught on to that.”

“From a no-good imitation goon that’s been trying to get to her here, which is why I’m shipping her out. I hate to break this up, but if you’ll ride with us, Mr. Cameron—”

“I’ll follow you down.”

“That’s right, you have your car. It’s Friendship Airport, just down the road.”

He told her to get ready, while he was having his car brought up, and the boy who would take her place on the desk was changing his clothes. Step on it, he said, but wait until he came back. He went out on the floor and marched past the drunk without even turning his head. But she sat watching me. She said: “You’re not coming, are you?”

“Friendship’s a little cold.”

“But not mine, Bill, no.”

She got off her stool, stood near me and touched my hair. She said: “Ships that pass in the night pass so close, so close.” And then: “I’m ashamed, Bill, I’d have to go for this reason. I wonder, for the first time, if gamblings’s really much good.” She pulled the chain of the light, so we were half in the dark. Then she kissed me. She said: “God bless and keep you, Bill.”

“And you, Lydia.”

I felt her tears on my cheek, and then she pulled away and stepped to the little office, where she began putting a coat on and tying a scarf on her head. She looked so pretty it came to me I still hadn’t given her the one little bouquet I’d been saving for the last. I picked up the guitar and started Nevada.

She wheeled, but what stared at me were eyes as hard as glass. I was so startled I stopped, but she kept right on staring. Outside a car door slammed, and she listened at the window beside her. Then a last she looked away, to peep through the Venetian blind. Jack popped in, wearing his coat and hat, and motioned her to hurry. But he caught something and said, low yet so I could hear him: “Lydia! What’s the matter?”

She stalked over to me, with him following along, pointed her finger, and then didn’t say it, but spat it: “He’s the finger — that’s what’s the matter, that’s all. He played Nevada, as though we hadn’t had enough trouble wit it already. And Vanny heard it. He hopped out of his car and he’s under the window right now.”

“Then O.K., let’s go.”

I was a little too burned to make with the explanations, and took my time, parking the guitar, sliding off, and climbing down, to give them a chance to blow. But she still had something to say, and to me, not to him. She pushed her face up to mine, and mocking how I had spoken, yipped: “Oh!.. Oh! OH!” Then she went, with Jack. Then I went, clumping after.

Then it broke wide open.

The drunk, who was supposed to sit there, conveniently boxed in, while she went slipping out, turned out more of a hog-calling type, and instead of playing his part, jumped up and yelled: “Vanny! Vanny! Here she comes! She’s leaving! VANNY”

He kept I up, while women creamed all over, then pulled a gun from his pocket, and let go at the ceiling, so it sounded like the field artillery, as shots always do when fired inside a room. Jack jumped for him and hit the deck, as his feet shot from under him on the slippery wood of the dance floor. Joe swung, missed, swung again, and landed, so Mr. Drunk went down. But when Joe scrambled for the gun, there came this voice through the smoke: “Hold it! As you were — and leave that gun alone.”

Then hulking in came this short-necked, thick-shouldered thing, in Homburg hat, double-breasted coat, and white muffler, one hand in his pocket, the other giving an imitation of a movie gangster. He said keep still and nobody would get hurt, but “I won’t stand for tricks.” He helped Jack up, asked how he’d been. Jack said: “Young man, let me tell you something—”

“How you been? I asked.”

“Fine, Mr. Rocco.”

“Any telling, Jack — I’ll do it.”

Then, to her: “Lydia, how’ve you been?”

“That doesn’t concern you.”

Then she burst out about what he had done to his mother, the gyp he’d handed his father, and his propositions to her, and I got it, at last, who this idiot was. He listened, but right in the middle of it, he waved his hand toward me and asked: “Who’s this guy?”

“Vanny, I think you know.”

“Guy, are you the boy friend?”

“If so I don’t tell you.”

I sounded tough, but my belly didn’t feel that way. They had it some more, and he connected me with the tune, and seemed to enjoy it a lot, that it had told him where to find her, on the broadcast as here now tonight. But he kept creeping closer, to where we were all lined up, with the drunk stretched on the floor, the gun under his hand, and I suddenly felt the prickle, that Vanny was really nuts, and in a minute meant to kill her. It also crossed my mind, that a guy who plays the guitar has a left hand made of steel, from squeezing down on the strings, and is a dead sure judge of distance, to the last eighth of an inch. I prayed I could forget it, told myself I owed her nothing at all, that she’d turned on me cold, with no good reason. I concentrated, to dismiss the thought entirely.

No soap.

I grabbed for my chord and got it.

I choked down on his hand, the one he held in his pocket, while hell broke loose in the place, with women screaming, men running, and fists trying to help, I had the gun hand all right, but when I reached for the other he twisted, butted, and bit, and for that long I thought he’d get loose, and that I was a gone pigeon. The gun barked, and a piledriver hit my leg. I went down. Another gun spoke and he went down beside me. Then here was Jack, the drunk’s gun in his hand, stepping in close, and firing again to make sure.

I blacked out.

I came to, and then she was there, a knife in her hand, ripping the cloth away from the outside of my leg, grabbing napkins, stanching blood, while somewhere ten miles off I could hear Jack’s voice, as he yelled into a phone. On the floor right beside me was something under a tablecloth.

That went on for some time, with Joe calming things down and some people sliding out. The band came in, and I heard a boy ask for his guitar. Somebody brought it to him. And then, at last, came the screech of sirens, and she whispered some thanks to God.

Then, while the cops were catching up, with me, with Jack, and what was under the cloth, we both went kind of haywire, me laughing, she crying, and both in each others’ arms. I said: “Lydia, Lydia, you’re not taking that plane. They legalize things in Maryland, one thing specially, except that instead of wheels, they generally use a ring.”

Still holding my leg with one hand she pulled me close with the other, kissed me and kept on kissing me, and couldn’t speak at all. All legalized now, is what I started to tell about — with Jack as best man, naturally.